Scene of the press conference

(BEIJING, October 31) -- The BOCOG Ticketing Center halted the domestic ticket sales Tuesday because the issue of the communications jam could not be solved in a short time frame, and the center would like to make sure that quality services are provided to the public, Rong Jun, director of BOCOG Ticketing Center, explained at Wednesday's press conference in Beijing.

At present, the relevant departments of BOCOG are racing to study the technical possibilities and policies to work out a tangible solution, Rong said.

Rong explained that the page view (PV) volume of eight million in the first hour of sales, beginning at 9:00am, on Tuesday, far exceeded the original system capacity to handle one million PVs per hour. Moreover, the ticket applications submitted from various channels reached 200,000 -- also overrunning the system capacity to process 150,000 per hour. At the same time, there were more than 3.8 million phone calls to the ticketing hotline (+8610 952008) at the call center. The communications jam on the main system also resulted in long queues at BOCOG-designated Bank of China (BOC) branches.

Starting at 1:00pm, the ticketing center worked with ticketing contractors to re-configure the sales system to improve the processing speed, resulting in a temporary suspension of all sales channels till roughly 5:00pm. The system was still, however, not stable enough afterwards, and the ticketing center decided to shut down the system at 6:00pm.

Statistics show that about 43,000 tickets were sold on Tuesday, 90 percent of which were sold through the online ticketing website.

"We saw criticism as well as good suggestions on the Internet pertaining to our work from a lot of netizens," Rong said, adding, "The preparatory work for the Beijing Olympic Games has won great support from the people, but our work wasn't able to accommodate the public. I, hereby, on behalf of the BOCOG Ticketing Center, sincerely apologize to the domestic ticket buyers."

He said that the ticketing center would learn from yesterday's scenario and improve its work to come up with an acceptable solution for the public as soon as possible.