Mumbai: Not a single ticket for the Cricket World Cup final to be held in Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium on April 2 was sold to the public after the official website crashed, the ICC said on Tuesday.
Tickets were put on sale at 0730 GMT on Monday via the International Cricket Council's (ICC) official ticketing partner Kyazoonga.com, but the website buckled under the pressure of huge traffic, sparking furious complaints from fans.
"We apologise to anyone who was trying to get on but these are exceptional circumstances when 10 million people were trying to get on the website at one time," an ICC spokesman said.
"They (Kyazoonga) were working throughout the night to get it up and running and not one ticket has been sold from the quota we had."
Of the 33,000 seats at the Wankhede, around 4,000 are available to the public -- 1,000 online while another 3,000-odd will be sold later for those who queue up at stadium box offices. The rest are distributed among the ICC and clubs affiliated to the Mumbai Cricket Association.
On Tuesday morning, the website was back up but had no information as to when tickets would go back on sale.
A small message on the website trumpeted: "And we're back! All semis and finals tickets that are to go up on sale here are intact. Please stay tuned for further updates."
Fans continued to bombard the online ticket agency's Facebook page with angry comments for the second day running.
"These guys have not done squat and no update... wow … what a bunch of bufoons (sic)," Ibaad Lari posted from Pakistan.
Another enraged fan, Rishi Dave, added: "I freakin woke up in the middle of my sleep to check if the site was working or not. Since me being on Australian time I also checked the website when most of you were sleeping, BUT same as before wudnt (sic) do anything...."
"You guys are lucky you can go queue at stadium ! ... i took day off to book these tickets for final and i cant get on the site !!!!" vented Sam Saleh.
The ICC said it was still trying to resolve the problems before releasing new details on when the tickets would be available.