Single and four-day memberships for Comic-Con 2011 went on sale on Monday at 9am. Shortly after registration was closed because of unspecified technical problems. Comic-Con spokesman David Glanzer came by KPBS to speak with me about what happened.
BETH ACCOMANDO: So what happened yesterday?
DAVID GLANZER: Our passes went on sale on Monday at 9am Pacific Time. And we noticed shortly after they went live that we started having problems with our website. It actually shut down at one point and we were able to get it back up in about fifteen minutes but we also noticed that the registration website was having problems. They weren't exactly sure what the issue was but in consultation with us we decided to shut down the process, give them this week to see what happened and what went wrong and how they can fix it, and then on Monday we'll announce when we are going to open back up.
ACCOMANDO: I imagine there was just a lot of traffic on your site and a lot of people panicking about getting their badges before you sold out.
GLANZER: Last year -- when registration opened in September 2009 -- they had about 85 requests per second. This year they had 250 requests per second, or nearly three times the traffic when registration opened on Monday. There was an issue because they were only able to process 21 memberships so clearly there was a problem. I think there was also a confusion because we have a status bar on our website and that status bar indicated that 13% of badges had been sold but that was an error I think that was in reference to badges that were sold on site because every year at Comic-Con we go ahead and sell badges for the following year and I think that took that into account.
ACCOMANDO: I think people perceive Comic-Con as this huge organization but it is actually a small non-profit, right?
GLANZER: We really have one person who works on our website, I mean there are people who contribute to our website but really one person who is in charge of it and as far as registration, we have a registration department but we also have the electronic portion of the website which is handled by a registration company and they are back east so for as big of an event as we are we really only have 18-20 full-time employees and a lot of them do an amazing job.
Hopefully online registration will open back up soon and Comic-Con fans can start buying up passes.
