‘Suspected cyber attack’: Tickify, BFF apologise for Singapore match ticket fiasco

Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) and Tickify, the online ticketing company appointed for the sale of tickets for Bangladesh's much-hyped Asian Cup Qualifiers fixture, sought apology following fiasco on the opening day of ticket sales.

The online ticket sales were supposed to start at 12:00pm on Saturday. However, Bangladesh Football Federation, in a press release, informed that the sales would kick off at 8:00pm.

The site started selling the match tickets around 10 minutes after the scheduled time, but soon the site weng down.

Some fans managed to purchase tickets, according to their social media posts as well as graphical data provided at the site while it was still up, but most of the fans have failed to get any due to the persistent technical issue with the site.

Tickify, which has previous experience of selling online tickets for BCB as well as for other events, later issued an apology through a press release, claiming that its site "may have been targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack". But in continuation of the same sentence, the press release claimed that there was "an unexpected surge of over 150,000 additional requests recorded in a short span of time, and this abnormal traffic spike significantly affected our platform's performance."

A press release from BFF, meanwhile, sought apology to fans while claiming that the Tickify site had been "victim of a cyber attack".

Despite repeated phone calls, Tickify representatives could not be found for a comment on how many tickets were sold during the short time the site was up after the opening of the sales.

Around 18,300 tickets are expected to be sold for the June 10 fixture at the National Stadium in Dhaka. 

Ticket prices start at Tk 400 for the general gallery. Club House-2 tickets are priced at Tk 2,000, Club House-1 at Tk 2,500, VIP Box-2 and 3 at Tk 2,500, Sky View at Tk 3,000, and VIP Box-1 at Tk 4,000. Hospitality and Corporate Box tickets have been priced at Tk 5000.