Comic Con's TicketLeap Apologizes and Explains the Madness

Saturday continued the Comic Con badge drama for the 3rd time. Folks still didn't get their badges and now many of them don't want to go to Comic Con.

TicketLeap's CEO Chris Stanchak sent a message on the site's blog, trying to ease pain of the SDCC hopefully attendees.

TicketLeap Users,

Yesterday our platform experienced capacity issues for a 4 hour period. During this time, most functionality was either slow or unavailable. We are very sorry for the frustration and problems this caused our users. We know how critical TicketLeap is to you and no amount of unplanned downtime is acceptable. I want you to know how seriously we take this situation.

The problems on TicketLeap yesterday occurred in association with an on-sale we conducted for the wildly popular event “Comic-Con International.” While we knew the event was going to put significant demand on our system, we did not expect the traffic we received.

In December, we conducted a test sale of 1,000 tickets in coordination with Comic-Con International to gauge the traffic to the platform and to work out any problems in a controlled fashion. After the test run, we made various optimizations to meet this demand level and scaled up our architecture with Amazon Web Services significantly.
The traffic we received yesterday was several orders of magnitude higher than our high end estimate. Due to the heavy strain on the system, users for all events across our system received “Over Capacity” errors. This prevented ticket buyers from buying tickets and it prevented event organizers from managing their events.

Throughout the day, we worked to adjust the scale of our infrastructure with Amazon in an effort to meet this demand. Unfortunately, we discovered a bottleneck that didn’t allow the platform to scale as needed. We are working with the highest levels of leadership at Amazon on this issue and will be delivering a detailed technical write-up in the coming days for those who are interested.

For anyone who bought tickets on Saturday to any event on TicketLeap and did not receive their confirmation email, we will be resending those confirmation emails on Monday to ensure that you received them. If you would like to resend them manually in the meantime, click here: http://www.ticketleap.com/resend-tickets/
For anyone who has any unresolved problems, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your account representative, to our support team, or to me personally.
Thank you for your patience.
Regards,
Chris Stanchak
CEO
TicketLeap, Inc.

Thanks for the apology, hopefully they can get these badge back out again. No one should miss Comic Con because of this.