On Thursday 4th February 2016, West Ham United Football Club's official ticketing system, http://www.whufcboxoffice.com, was displaying the following queuing page to visitors:
We noticed this after seeing an advert in the morning Metro newspaper. The advert was informing readers that it was potentially their last chance to purchase FA Cup tickets at the Boleyn Ground before the team move to the Olympic Stadium next season. In particular there was an FA Cup replay fixture against Liverpool with available tickets.
This is likely to be one of the causes for the upsurge in traffic to the website. I have currently been ‘In the queue’ for several hours and counting. This suggests there are potentially some real underlying issues with the site. In other attempts to access the site we were presented with the following page:
The queuing page would have been put in place by the website, in an attempt to control the level of traffic. West Ham fans displayed their anger at the club via twitter.
If you want to find out how to avoid this happening to your own website then please read our article with some top tips:
https://www.capacitas.co.uk/blog/why-do-so-many-websites-fail-on-black-friday
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