About 700 people pushed and shoved and organizers threatened to shut down a World Cup ticket centre as fans scrambled for a last chance to watch the tournament’s biggest games—only to discover that FIFA’s systems had crashed.
Two hours into today’s final release, no one had been able to buy any of the 160,000 tickets still available for the world’s biggest football tournament.
Fifa says service provider Match was experiencing “significant delays” due to technical problems across all sales channels.
Chief organiser Danny Jordaan said he wanted to “sincerely apologise” to the fans, some of whom had been queuing for two days, for the problems. Fifa says it has demanded a full report from Match.
