Update: World Series ticket sales to resume after Colo. stall

Computerworld - After a 26-hour delay, the Colorado Rockies baseball team will at last be able to sell its tickets for World Series home games at Coors Field. Sales should begin Tuesday at noon MDT on the Rockies' Web site.

When its automated ticketing vendor's servers crashed early Monday morning, the Rockies struck out as they tried to sell tickets to three home World Series games, set to begin on Saturday.

"It's been an extremely frustrating day for our fans and the entire Rockies' organization," Keli McGregor, the Rockies team president, said in a statement. "Our Web site, and ultimately our fans and our organization, were the victim of an external, malicious attack that shut down the system and kept our fans from being able to purchase their World Series tickets.

"Throughout the day we've evaluated all of our options, and we continue to believe that the online sale approach is the most fair and equitable method to distribute the tickets. Our partners at MLB.com and Paciolan have fully assessed the situation and assured us that tomorrow's online sale will go as originally planned."

No further information about the incident was available as of Monday evening.

Shaw Taylor, marketing director at Irvine, Calif.-based Paciolan Inc., confirmed late Monday that Paciolan suffered "an outage across all of the company's clients" about 12:10 p.m. (EDT) that lasted for about 90 minutes and interrupted the sales of the Rockies' World Series tickets.

The National League team, which will face the American League champion Boston Red Sox beginning Wednesday night in Boston, had announced last week that it would sell its World Series tickets via an online process to make it fair for all ticket buyers for the first World Series to involve a Colorado team.

Only about 500 tickets had been sold online before the outage occurred 10 minutes after the tickets went on sale, Taylor said.

Taylor said Paciolan, which has about 550 different sports teams and venues that use its automated ticket-selling services, has never had an outage like this before. He did not disclose what caused the problem but said the company will release more details later. "We are still trying to put together an exact response to what happened," he said.

Paciolan has been in the automated ticketing-system business since about 1980. All of the company's tickets sales operations were back in operation after this morning's outage ended, Taylor said.

The first two World Series games are scheduled to take place in Boston on Wednesday and Thursday, with Games 3 and 4 scheduled for Denver on Saturday and Sunday. Game 5, if it is necessary, will be played in Denver next Monday.

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