Monday, February 21, 2011

Hitting Refresh

I spent over an hour before and after lunch hitting refresh on a webpage. The Board of Control for Cricket in India had decided finally to make available tickets for the cricket World Cup final, which is being held in Bombay for the first time. The stadium holds some 50,000, of which a grand total of 3000 tickets were offered for sale on the open market, of which 1000 were to be sold online starting 1pm. I knew the site was going to be overloaded, but I did what I could, as doubtless did like tens of thousands of others.
At one point I managed to get to the relevant page, a list of all matches to which tickets were available, but the final wasn't among them. I don't know if all 1000 passes had been bought up by then (it was about 4 minutes past 13.00 hours IST) or whether the BCCI and its partner the ecommerce site Kyazoonga hadn't managed to load the relevant page. When I hit refresh to see if an extended list popped up, the page refused to load, and remained offline till I gave up an hour later.
I just checked and the site is still down. I guess I'm going to watch the World Cup Final on TV as always.

UPDATE, 24 February: The website crashed and apparently not a single ticket was sold. So now they're going to redo the whole thing as a lottery. Meanwhile, in the brick and mortar world, there are riots and lathi charges at venues, with thousands queueing up for the few available tickets. Appalling mismanagement, considering the BCCI is among the richest sports bodies in the world.

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