This is a big story here in Denver. Controversially, all available tickets (above season ticket holders and bigwigs) went for sale online yesterday at 10AM. As I suspected, the servers were brought to their knees. Everyone in the local media was talking about how unfair it was that any people or bots worldwide would get the same chance. Time for an extremely rigorous test, right? The contractor was "amazed and overwhelmed" with the traffic.
The Rockies spokesman calls it a DOS attack. Nice way to redefine that term. I seriously doubt anyone attempted to deny service - everyone wanted tickets.
At one point it was reported (though I can't find a link) that a "trojan" was released shortly after 10AM. Yet this lady got her tickets @ 10:35. Trojan my butt. And which was it anyway? A known trojan and you were negligent by not having properly patched servers? Or is it a new trojan that the security community will soon know about?
Even plain old fashioned load balancing was apparently not working correctly.
The red sox opted for a much simpler lottery system which notified lottery winners so they could purchase tickets.