All non-football tickets for the London 2012 Olympics apparently sold out within an hour on Friday morning, with thousands of fans left frustrated again as the ticketing website crashed under the weight of traffic.
Games organisers had insisted that the site would withstand the expected heavy traffic for the second round of ticket sales, but thousands of hopeful fans were left staring glumly at a message simply asking them to be patient.
And those who left it too long to apply were left without any chance at all, with a message on the Olympic ticketing site at 7am stating that "Olympic Games tickets have been allocated", with fans reporting as early as 6:45am that even after successfully getting into the system all tickets had sold out for events in the Olympic Park. Others reported that some tickets were left for some matches of the Olympic football tournament.
London Games organising committee chief executive Paul Deighton had expressed confidence that Ticketmaster's technology would withstand the numbers logging from 6am this morning but the site buckled after just one minute.
And by 7am it appears all the remaining seats had been snapped up by those desperate to witness the Olympic Games on home soil.
The farce will increase the anger of the 1.2 million people who had missed out on seats in the first round of ticketing, but had been given a preferential window to apply for the 2.3 million remaining tickets - for which only 600,000 were for non-football events.
While the first batch of 2012 tickets were sold via a ballot, with more than half of the 650 sessions oversubscribed and a total of 3m seats sold to 700,000 applicants, the second phase was sold online on a first-come-first-served basis.
Most of those attempting to apply were greeted with messages telling them to "try again later" at various points during their application.
Some claimed the message appeared after they had submitted their credit card details, meaning they were unsure if their request for seats was successful.
When they checked their account status, it showed no tickets but when they subsequently tried to reapply, there were informed they had already made their application.
Later another message was added, that read: "We are experiencing high demand. You will be automatically directed to the page requested as soon as it becomes available. Thank you for your patience."However, organisers claimed that the website is working, despite problems due to high demand, and are urging people to be patient and not refresh their applications.
"The website is currently working there is a lot of demand but the first people to log on have had their transactions go through," they said.
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