TicketLeap snags Comic-Con assignment but runs into some issues
Philadelphia-based online ticketing startup TicketLeap got a bit more publicity than it bargained for yesterday morning when ticketing for the popular Comic-Con 2011 event (to be held in San Diego) went live, as its system quickly went to overcapacity after the 9 am (Pacific) start time, and the problems apparently lasted up to four hours. This was particularly troublesome since the Geek-oriented convention had turned to TicketLeap after two previous failed attempts with another vendor, and TicketLeap had tried to carefully test out its system for the event with a trial run in December. Reaction was so widespread that TicketLeap was briefly trending globally on Twitter.
TicketLeap CEO Chris Stanchak, who responded yesterday on Twitter, posted on the TicketLeap Blog today about the situation. To summarize, he said that although they tried to prepare for heavy demand it still was more than they expected, and as they tried to adjust the scale of their infrastructure with Amazon Web Services during the day, a yet to be specified "bottleneck" prevented the necessary adjustments from taking effect quickly. Not clear whether that bottleneck was more TicketLeap's
or Amazon's problem; a basic benefit of Amazon Web Services is that it is supposed to be fairly elastic in expanding to meet customer capacity requirements. Chris says TicketLeap will follow up with a more technical explanation in the next few days.
Update: TicketLeap's post on the technical issues.
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