Ticketing site BookMyShow crashed just seconds before it opened on Sunday noon for bookings to the British-band Coldplay's Mumbai concert after more than 13 million fans joined the online queue for tickets.
The 'alternative rock/pop' band, which will be making its 'Music of the Spheres World Tour' between October 2024 and August 2025 are scheduled to perform at Navi Mumbai's D Y Patil stadium on January 18 and 19, 2025. After Sunday's ticket rush, a third show on January 21 was announced.
Coldplay is coming to India eight years after their 2016 show at the Global Citizen Festival in Mumbai. The band, formed in 1997, comprises Chris Martin, the lead vocalist, Phil Harvey, Jonny Buckland, Guy Berryman, and Will Champion. Among their biggest hits are "Hymn for the Weekend', a big hit in India, 'Something just like this', 'Yellow', 'A Sky Full of Stars', 'Fix You', 'Don't Panic', 'Adventure of a lifetime', 'Viva La Vida', and 'In My Place'. The band's new studio album, 'Moon Music' is releasing in October, 2024. Apart from Mumbai, the latest tour will travel to Australia, New Zealand, Abu Dhabi, Seoul, and Hong Kong.
Fans who managed to rejoin the online queue after the site recovered from the crash found themselves behind hundreds of thousands of others who had got there microseconds earlier, said a young buff from Chembur. Around 1.5 Lakh tickets were on sale for spaces on the stands and on the ground. The cheapest tickets were priced at Rs 2500 while the most expensive ones in the 'lounge' were sold at Rs 35,000. In less than an hour after sales began, resellers were offering tickets on social media and other online sites at prices 10 to 20 times the original cost, with reports that some tickets were being offered at over Rs 3.3 lakhs.
Anticipating the demand, the booking site had restricted the number of tickets to a maximum of four. However, the rush overwhelmed the site, leading it to crash. A company spokesperson was quoted in the media as saying, "We implemented a queueing system to manage the overwhelming demand and addressed issues caused by suspicious and malicious traffic within minutes, causing a brief delay, but ensuring minimal disruption for genuine fans. Due to the unprecedented demand, a third Mumbai show was added shortly thereafter, which also received a fantastic response."
Frustrated fans took recourse to memes to drown their sorrow. A user named Sagar recollected a TV serial-inspired meme that had gone viral years ago. Reacting to how the Coldplay ticket sale crashed the BookMyShow server, he shared the scene of Gopi Bahu from the popular television show 'Saath Nibhaana Saathiya' and it showed the character washing a laptop with water.
Another X user compared the situation with the frequent crash of the train ticket booking portal. Identified as Pavan Desai, he hilariously took a dig at the recent situation and suggested the IRCTC Tatkal service to be jealous of Coldplay after the band's ticket sales crashed BookMyShow. Sharing a shot from the animated film 'Kung Fu Panda', Desai referred to the meme-famous dialogue: "Finally, a worthy opponent."
One user said that "To get sold out on Coldplay was acceptable. To not be able to Log in was not. They (BookMyShow) didn't even worry about the server, Why did you decide to host the ticket sale."
