Ticketing glitch upsets Cork festival-goers

Concert-goers trying to buy tickets for the upcoming Sounds from a Safe Harbour (SFSH) Festival were frustrated in their efforts when a software problem cut the connection between the ticket system providers, SeatGeek, and the Cork Opera House booking system.

The problem arose on Monday and lasted for half an hour, during which time the queuing system was disrupted and tickets could not be purchased. Some of those in the queue at the time lost their place and had to rejoin the back of the queue.

Cork Opera House issued an apology on its Facebook page yesterday saying that while it had done all it could to ensure it was prepared “for a huge influx of traffic to the website”, events beyond its control caused the ticketing system and website to become unavailable.

The post said a software problem resulted in a loss of internet connectivity to its service, “which in turn resulted in a number of issues with the booking process” in relation to artists Damien Rice and Feist.

“This outage throughout Ireland and the UK rendered our ticketing software inaccessible for that period of time, disrupting the queuing system that we had put in place, and making it impossible to purchase tickets during that time period.

“SeatGeek have addressed the issue that caused this and offer their sincere apologies to everyone affected by the disruption,” the post read.

Coincidentally, the Opera House also suffered ticketing issues due to technical problems during the SFSH Festival in 2017.

The post said the Opera House had, over the last 12 months, taken on board the feedback of patrons and “changed our entire Box Office system in order to minimise the risks of something like this happening”.

It said Monday’s issues were “very different” to issues encountered in the past but they were “very aware that they significantly affected our patrons, and for this, again we unreservedly apologise.”