APOLOGY FROM RUN RIOT
We are truly very sorry for the inconvenience caused to those of you wanting to buy tickets for You Me Bum Bum Train, as well as those who have bought tickets but have had to be allocated to an alternative date. We have set up a FAQs page as well as a full Technical Explanation (below) - we owe you this many times over.
We were expecting a large volume of traffic, but we were clearly overwhelmed by the intensity of it - meaning tickets were selling at a rate of 500 per 30 seconds. During this period we were being hit by 80'000 hits wanting to buy under 1000 tickets. Despite preparing the company who hosts our dedicated server, the main Run Riot site buckled. In response to this we redirected all traffic to an alternative server. This took time, but as soon as it was working we announced the tickets being on sale - which sold out within seconds.
- If you have bought tickets, but need answers to your questions, please check our FAQ's page.
- For those of you who were unable to buy a ticket, but would like to be involved with the production - we highly recommend it! Contact youmebumbumtraincast@gmail.com for info on how to get involved.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused, and are working on resolving immediate issues about your tickets as swiftly as we can.

YOU ME BUM BUM TRAIN
You Me Bum Bum Train are in no way responsible for the management of the ticket sales or any of the technical issues that have arisen. They are the promoter and are responsible for the event. Run Riot are acting as the ticket sales agent, and are responsible for the method of ticket sales. Run Riot has great respect and admiration for You Me Bum Bum Train - for those of you without tickets and would like to get involved with the production, we highly recommend joining their cast or crew. Contact youmebumbumtraincast@gmail.com for info on how to get involved.

TECHNICAL EXPLANATION

WEBSITE-DOWN
When we initially put the tickets on sale at midday, the server running the ticket engine coped extremely well for the 30k hits we had in the space of an hour. There was no latency on that part, and ticket sales were going through. However the server actually hosting run-riot.com [a Dedicated server] started to buckle under strain. Due to the site buckling we had to setup a redirect straight to the ticket portal which again handled fine under load.

The hosting company that Run Riot is hosted on weren't able to scale up our website to meet our requirements, so we had to take the decision to just use the ticket platform as the whole site. This worked well and we could cope with demand again.

In some ways, having the ticket engine so resilient to the traffic that was being thrown at it (80,000 hits during the day) was the cause of the problem we had with over-selling.

UPDATES
With the Run Riot server being down we were unable to send any update emails. However, updates were posted on our Twitter account @run_riot

OVERSELLING
To explain why and how we oversold:

We use PayPal for our payment system, but PayPal doesn't necessarily update is in real time when orders have been complete, it's fairly instant but it happens in a queue so we weren't notified of some payments until someone had already grabbed that ticket as these were flying out the door so fast. We saw that we had over sold on some tickets and pulled the tickets off immediately. We moved the over-sells from the first batch (on sale at 12:00, 07/11/11) into the second batch and re-issued everyones ticket that we had moved to the new date.

Then on the second batch (on sale at 17:30, 07/11/11) we saw the tickets all sell out, and people could no longer buy the tickets from the site. However, as mentioned before PayPal then notified us of more payments.

We are taking steps to correct this. We hope we are able to answer your questions on the FAQS page. And of course please contact us if you have any questions.

For all of you who have been caused a massive inconvenience, we are truly sorry.

If you'd like to actually get involved with the You Me Bum Bum Train production as cast or crew email them at youmebumbumtraincast@gmail.com