Ticket system for Beijing olympics crashes

The booking system for tickets to the 2008 Beijing Olympics was brought to it’s knees on Tuesday resulting in only 9,000 tickets being sold in the first two hours.

The website saw 8 million visits in the first hour with 200,000 ticket requests per minute. Phone lines were inundated as a further 2 million people tried to obtain tickets and official vendors saw astronomical queues from early in the morning.

The second round of tickets went on sale earlier this week with the first 1.6 million tickets being raffled off in a lottery back in June. The 1.8 million remaining tickets were to be sold on a first-come first-served basis.

The 7 million tickets will be sold in three phases with three quarters of the tickets to be sold to residents China and the remaining quarter to be sold to supporters overseas.