London Olympics tickets resale suspended

PA

London Olympics 2012 organisers have suspended a ticket resale system on the day it was launched following problems with the website.

The biggest problem was reported to be that the site, run by Ticketmaster, was slow to update sessions that had sold out.

For example, tickets for the men's handball semi-finals were still showing as available hours after they had immediately sold out when the site went live on Friday.

The process was organised to allow people to sell on tickets they had bought that they no longer want, in a bid to beat the problem of ticket touts.

According to the Telegraph, the London 2012 organising committee Locog and Ticketmaster suspended the ticket uploading process at around 1pm to help the system refresh.

But by early evening the problem had not been solved, leading to a temporary suspension of the resale process.

According to the BBC, Locog said in a statement: "We have told Ticketmaster to suspend the resale system whilst they investigate some issues customers have been experiencing.

"We want buying and selling Olympic and Paralympic tickets through Ticketmaster to be a good customer experience, and so we will re-open the site once Ticketmaster have resolved these issues."

But amongst the bad reports (like tickets being selected but disappearing after proceeding to the checkout page), there were some happy customers who snapped up tickets for top events like the men's 400m final.

When it's back up and running, the resale system will allow people to upload unwanted tickets for sale until 3 February.

The news of the suspension comes just days after Locog oversold 10,000 tickets for the synchronised swimming event.

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