Olympic ticketing service limps over finish line

Thousands of sports fans were left frustrated last night as the official Olympics ticketing web site crashed in the hours before the opportunity to buy tickets closed.

High demand was blamed for the problem, and the deadline for ticket purchases was extended by an hour.

Organisers posted an explanation on the web site last night.

"Some people experienced a temporary delay when accessing the Olympics ticketing site following a surge of applications at around 10:30pm this evening.

"This surge has now evened out and the system is working normally. Applications were still being processed during this period.

"We apologise for any inconvenience this delay may have caused and the ticketing system will remain open until 1am."

Andreas Edler, managing director at web hosting firm Hostway UK, argued that organisers should have expected and catered for the peak in traffic.

"It was known that millions of people were going to visit the site in the hope of a seat at the London Olympics and a lot of people left it to the last minute.

"Irrespective of the sudden late peak in demand, you would expect all ticketing web sites to build in adequate capacity and utilise better traffic management practices to cope with the surge in visitors," he added.