New York Comic Con's Ticket Sales End in Epic Fail

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Image: New York Comic Con

By Karissa Bell2014-06-27 02:19:07 UTC

Three-day tickets to the New York Comic Con went on sale Thursday and ended in an epic failure after the website crashed.

See also: 15 New York Comic Con Cosplayers Bizarrely Taking Breaks

Comic Con's site went down almost as soon as tickets went on sale Wednesday afternoon, according to The Insightful Panda :

All users could see was a blank page with the small words up top “Not Found (Error to Origin). Despite constant refreshing and reloading, nothing could fix this.

For its part, Comic Con acknowledged the technical difficulties but may have ended up making matters more confusing. In an attempt to remedy the situation, Comic Con tweeted a link that promised to take people directly to the queue.

This apparently caused more confusion, since ticket buyers were unclear on whether or not they should refresh the page. The Insightful Panda again:

Once on the Queue page, we read what the page entailed and it explicitly stated that the page would automatically refresh itself. Manually refreshing the page wouldn’t help you move faster; however, it also wouldn’t make you lose your place in line. It wasn’t until over 10 minutes later that their Facebook page urged users to NOT hit refresh as this would return them to the back of the line.

Again, Comic Con's attempts to clarify the situation ended up being more confusing than helpful.

At this point, the website apparently began indicating that tickets were sold out:

I learned from my friends who were at the ticket page – because I was STILL in the Queue – that the tickets were apparently already sold out for 3 Day. This happened barely 20 minutes after the whole fiasco started and I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t until I got to the ticket page 45 minutes later that the FB page finally reported that this was also incorrect and that we should ‘refresh’ the ticket page to see there are tickets.

Many users were apparently unable to purchase tickets at all, despite spending more than an hour on the site. Disappointed would-be attendees took to Twitter and Facebook to vent their frustration about the ticket-buying process.

Comic Con hasn't explained the source of the trouble. Some Facebook users are taking them to task for allegedly deleting negative comments and previous posts about the earlier problems — though the organization did respond to a few comments by saying they were simply trying to avoid confusion.

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Topics: new york comic con, U.S., US & World, US & World