The kickoff of sales for the Elton John concert tickets stirred up quite a crowd Friday, Jan. 25, with a lineup winding nearly around the entire inside of Beasley Coliseum.
Students and faculty were trying to buy tickets online with laptops and over their cell phones while waiting in line.
All the tickets – more than 11,000 – were sold between 10 a.m. and just shortly after noon.
Due to the volume of traffic through Verizon phone lines, local and long-distance service to and from the Pullman campus was blocked for about one hour beginning about 10:15 a.m.
According to sales outlet TicketsWest, its web servers experienced more than 6,000 concurrent connections throughout the sales period. Qwest said TicketsWest received more than 5,000 calls per minute at one point.
Due to heavy website traffic, TicketsWest twice displayed just its maintenance page – at 10:21 and 11:12 a.m. – in order to let traffic already on the site complete pending transactions.
Sales from the various channels amounted to:
* 41 percent, or 4,460 tickets, on the website.
* 33 percent, or 3,551 tickets, from TicketsWest outlets.
* 20 percent, or 2,174 tickets, over the phone.
* 6 percent, or 700 tickets, at the Beasley coliseum box office.
