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.

I FINALLY got Comic Con Badges

After touching the Refresh Button more than I ever touched myself, I finally got my Comic Con badges. It took over an hour, the site kept breaking down over and over, but I pressed through.

However, I wish Comic Con would just suck it up and just let Ticketmaster handle this. If they can handle Justin Bieber tickets, I'm sure they can handle Comic Con. I hope the rest of geek fam had better luck today.

For more insight about this mess, go here

Buying Comic Con Tickets, Take 3

After 2 failed attempts to sell badges, Comic Con will giving it another try this Saturday. They supposedly have a new system that will not crash in the middle of purchasing (we'll see).

They even have instructions to guarantee a smooth transaction:

• Do NOT create a TicketLeap account at any time. These accounts are only for people hosting events. We don’t pre-store credit card information for ticket buyers, you will have to enter it manually on Saturday when you purchase tickets. By not creating an account before, during or after tickets go on sale this leaves our Support Team free to help those who need assistance.
• Check your browser settings. Make sure you are running the most current version of your web browser. Please note that Internet Explorer 9 (which is in beta) will not be supported during the purchasing process. In addition, check your browser settings to make sure that JavaScript is enabled.
• Have your information ready. Be sure your credit card billing information and each badge holder’s information is 100% accurate. If you enter your credit card information incorrectly, a pending charge will be placed on your card and your tickets will NOT be purchased. You will need the first name, last name and email address of each badge holder to complete your purchase.
• Don’t time out your session. Once you have successfully put tickets in your shopping cart, you have 15 minutes to complete the necessary buyer information. If you take longer than 15 minutes your tickets will be released.
• There are no phone sales. Comic-Con tickets can only be purchased online, so have your computer ready at 9 a.m. PST on Saturday.

Don't f**k this up, Comic Con or I'll swear I will release the Kraken on your asses.