Colorado Rockies' ticket site fails

The Colorado Rockies baseball team is about to start its World Series against the Boston Red Sox. Unfortunately, the Rockies' ticket sales website went down just as fans were trying to purchase seats. As described in CFO magazine:

The Rockies announced Monday that due to an overload of demand — more than 8.5 million hits on its website — Paciolan, an independent vendor handling the team’s World Series ticket sales, experienced a system-wide outage. As a result, after selling only 500 tickets, the Rockies had to temporarily suspend sales for the third through fifth games of the series, which are slated to be played at its Coors Field home in Denver.

The Canadian Press adds:

Dave Marcus of McAfee Avert Labs, the research arm of antivirus software maker McAfee Inc., said Paciolan could have been the target of a "denial-of-service" attack Monday.

Regardless of whether the outage was caused by website failure or a deliberate attack, it was certainly bad timing for fans.