Yesterday, tickets for The Great GoogaMooga—a weekend-long food and music festival from the creators of Bonnaroo being held in Prospect Park in May—became available...except that a lot of people couldn't get them. Frustrated would-be patrons took to Twitter to vent about website crashes and ticket waiting rooms (one woman even documented it via screenshots). We spoke with Kevin Hartz, CEO of Eventbrite—the ticketing company for GoogaMooga—who apologized for the massive ticket fail: "In short, we had technical difficulties due to traffic and demand on our servers." On the plus side, $250 VIP tickets are still available!
Hartz took full blame for the web problems: "This outage falls entirely on us, and we take this type of rare occurrence very seriously...We are working together with the GoogaMooga event organizers to take care of everyone who was trying to get tickets today and fulfill all pending registration requests." In addition to the still-available VIP tickets, he said more tickets will be released on the GoogaMooga website prior to the event in the coming months. In addition, some customers who got to the confirmation screen, but who did not yet receive an email with confirmation of their registration, are still receiving those confirmation emails today.
GoogaMooga and Eventbrite may have everything covered when it comes to in-person lines, but obviously there are still some kinks to be worked out with digital lines. For the future, we'd add that even though there were 40,000 free GA tickets available, it may not have been the best idea to automatically give everyone who registered 4 tickets, thereby permitting only 10,000 individual orders. And if they really want to get as efficient as possible, Hitler's favorite car company is always up for ridiculous ticket giveaways.
