Honey, I Blew Up the Servers

It was enough of a public relations issue when the Colorado Rockies decided last week to make World Series tickets available only online, but this plan blew up in their faces Monday when the demand for tickets overwhelmed the servers which were designated to handle those transactions. As a result, only a few hundred tickets were sold before Paciolan, the company in charge of those servers, had to shut down their systems for the remainder of the day. As of Monday night, we still don't have World Series tickets, even though thousands of them are still available according to the Rockies ticket office.

Initially, we didn't have a problem with the online-only strategy. In this age of electronic commerce, we can't imagine why anyone would want to wait in line for ticket. However, out-of-state fans, especially fans of the opposing team, are more likely to acquire tickets under an online-only scenario, while tickets purchased at a local box office are much more likely to go to hometown fans. The Rockies inadvertently put their fan base in direct competition with Red Sox Nation, and that nation is quite big and powerful. In retrospect, no one should be surprised that Paciolan's servers received 8.5 millions hits within 90 minutes after the tickets went on sale at 10:00 am.