A national system outage caused major problems for college football fans and ticket offices over the weekend and impacted hundreds of thousands of consumers. The outage meant fans couldn’t access tickets in the mobile-only ecosystem, and schools on the system with home games — some of the most prominent in collegiate athletics — were stuck until the issue was fixed.
Problems reportedly surfaced late on Saturday morning as kick-off times for the full schedule of games approached. Issues included problems accessing tickets through the mobile-only ticketing systems, as well as problems transferring tickets from one account to another.
The troubles caused significant delays in entering the stadium, with many fans likely being barred from purchasing tickets entirely even at the last minute. According to the Associated Press, many schools emailed fans who had purchased tickets so they could show them to stadium staff, who allowed them to attend games that were already in progress.
“I was clean-shaven when we got in line, so it’s been a minute,” joked a fan waiting to attend a game on Saturday. Eventually, the box office printed out paper tickets so those waiting for the mobile-only system to come back to life had a chance to get in before the game was too far over. “Old school, take it back to Jonny Majors in Pitt, old school paper tickets,” said the fan.
Paciolan is a dominant force in the collegiate athletics ticketing world, making the timing of her retirement particularly problematic. According to its website, it is the largest primary ticketing company in higher education, with 125 customers, including 75 percent of the so-called Power Five schools.
System outages like Saturday’s have been the bane of mobile systems, from queues across the country caused by a major Ticketmaster issue that shut down entry for multiple events to a case where Kid Rock fans waited in a long line had to print tickets at the venue when the mobile entry option failed. Consumer advocates have also spoken out against mobile-only ticketing systems for accessibility reasons, as low-income and older consumers have less access to smartphones.
While some fans took it easy, many others weren’t so pleased with the massive outage and the chaos it caused, and took to social media to vent their frustration.
you watch live @PaciolanTix latest ticketing technology for colleges across America. I hope heads rolled this morning. It’s a shame what you did to hundreds of thousands of people yesterday. #paciolan pic.twitter.com/dEddTiy1te
— JMIII (@tickets113) September 11, 2022
Reports indicate that the problems were largely resolved by mid-afternoon, meaning most of the game-time issues were confined to early competitions – although consumers who needed to buy or transfer tickets for later games also had plenty of headaches.
Paciolan has not officially commented on the failure until Monday afternoon.
Last updated on September 12, 2022 by Dave Clark
