Tickets for the 2008 Beijing Olympics went on sale Tuesday, but due to the extremely high demand, the computer systems crashed. The tickets were sold on a first-come, first-serve basis.
It was stated last week that a main computer system stores all transactions made online.
It was not clear how many tickets were successfully purchased Tuesday, when 1.85 million tickets became available on a first-come, first-served basis. Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG) said 9,000 were sold after two hours, almost all of them through the ticketing Web site and in person at Bank of China branches.
The ticketing Web site was visited 8 million times in the first hour of the sale, receiving more than 200,000 ticket requests per second. More than 2 million people called the telephone hot line in the first hour, BOCOG said.
Tickets that went on sale Tuesday were for the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as all sporting events. About 2.2 million tickets became available on April 15, but only for those whose names were picked in a lottery.
More than 7 million tickets will be sold for the Beijing Olympics, to Chinese as well as visitors from elsewhere.
This is the second computer crash in two weeks involving ticket sales for a highly anticipated sporting event. Last week, the Colorado Rockies website crashed due the sale of World Series tickets.
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