A Massive Baseball “Denial of Service” Type Event
Ah - it’s so much fun when baseball and technology cross paths. As I blogged earlier today, the Ski Boy in Florida, Lucy in Denver, and me in Anchorage, were all set and ready to go at 10:00 AM MDT when the Rockies opened up on-line sales for World Series tickets. I had real doubts as to whether the MLB/Rockies servers would be up to the task. But, we were ready if they were. Well, the site got Avalanched (wait - that’s the Denver hockey team). One could make it to the “click here” to buy tickets button, but after that, the system timed out. Time and time again.
Lucy and Peter and I tried and tried and tried for two hours. But no luck. I did notice over that time period that MLB rolled on new servers, but those were timing out just as quickly as the old ones.
Lucy and Peter were both worried that all the tickets had been snatched up. I wasn’t worried - there was no way anyone could get in. Finally, almost three hours after the tickets went on sale, The Rockies posted the following message:
This morning, after more than 8.5 million hits on the Colorado Rockies website, Paciolan (Pack-ee-o-lan), Major League Baseball’s ticket vendor, experienced a system wide outage that impacted all of its North American customers. As a result, the Colorado Rockies have suspended the sale of 2007 World Series tickets scheduled to be played at Coors Field.
“It’s been an extremely frustrating morning for our fans and the entire Rockies’ organization,” said Keli McGregor, Rockies’ team president. “We are working diligently with Major League Baseball and Paciolan to resolve the issues impacting online ticket sales for the 2007 World Series.”
Although some ticket transactions (less than 500 seats) did take place this morning, virtually the entire allotment for all three games of the World Series scheduled for Coors Field remains intact. A plan for the sale of the available World Series tickets will be announced as soon as the details are available.
8.5 million hits in 90 minutes - that’s basically the equivalent of a denial of service attack. I’m not sure why it took them so long to get the message posted and shut the site down. It was obvious from the outset that the ship was torpedoed and sunk before it even left the dock. We’ll be waiting when the ship is refloated!
This ESPN story provides a few more details.
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Oh now really. Are you telling me they didn’t have a clue what was going to happen? If that is really the case, their entire web-IT staff should be looking for a job.
P.S. After thinking about this for a while and being placed in similar no win situations, it crosses my mind that the IT staff could have warned management what was going to happen only to have management ignore the warnings and go forward anyway.
Your second remark is probably much closer to the truth. I’m thinking O-rings and space shuttles and managers who don’t want to hear bad news.
I had originally snorted at the Rockies assertion of a trojan horse. But upon reflection it’s quite possible that a large number of PC’s were infected and the attacked coordinated. But still….
I don’t believe it was a DOS. They simply could not handle the demand. Exclusive internet sales was a poor decision all the way around that will haunt them in ticket sales for the next few seasons.
P.S. Our reporter, Paula Haddock, is a Denver resident and she’s not buying the malicious attack story either.