Organisers put 100,000 tickets on sale yesterday morning local time, with sessions in every sport available as well as the Opening and Closing ceremonies.

But since then, a flood of people have reported spending hours waiting in an online queue for tickets, only for the website to crash.

Others have reported problems with the phone line.

Glasgow 2014 closed the website for an hour from midnight to "continue investigations", but a second day of woes has forced them to shut it down until they are are convinced the issue is fixed.

A statement from organisers said: "At 5pm today we instructed our official ticketing agent Ticketmaster to close the Glasgow 2014 ticketing website and call centre until we can be assured that the technical issues being experienced by our ticket buyers over the last day and half are resolved to our satisfaction.

"Ticketmaster is working as quickly as possible to act on this instruction.

"We want the purchase of Commonwealth Games tickets through the Ticketmaster system to be a positive experience for all customers and we realise this has not been the case for many.

"We thank everyone for their patience and apologise unreservedly to everyone who has been affected and inconvenienced by this disappointing situation.

"We will not allow the frustrations experienced by our customers throughout the last day and a half to continue further.

"We will only re-open the site once Ticketmaster is confident that the issues with the website have been resolved.

"Our continued focus is on being able to offer our customers a robust website on which they can purchase tickets for the Commonwealth Games."

More than half of the 100,000 tickets that went on sale yesterday morning have been sold, organisers say ©Glasgow 2014



American ticket sales and distribution company Ticketmaster was appointed Official Ticketing Services Provider for the Games last May after performing a similar role ahead of London 2012.

On that occasion it was also criticised after problems with its website, which people continually complained they could not log onto, and this led to the process being suspended while the problems were being sorted out.

But despite the apparent similarities, a Ticketmaster spokeswoman told insidethegames earlier that the system being used on this occasion is very different to the one used for London 2012.

She added that providing tickets for major sporting competitions is much more complicated than for other events, due to the multiple venues and sessions, but claimed they have received good feedback as well as criticism.

Organisers say 55,000 tickets have been sold since the 100,000 tickets were put on sale yesterday, with tickets still available for "most sports and the Ceremonies".

Games chief executive David Grevemberg has said the situation is "totally unacceptable".

Glasgow 2014 chief executive David Grevemberg says the ticketing fiasco is "totally unacceptable" ©Getty Images



"It was an incredibly frustrating and disappointing day yesterday," he told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme before the decision was taken to close the website and phone line.

"It's just not in keeping with the experience we are trying to create with Glasgow 2014.

"To put it simply, the system just did not cope.

"Despite being fully tested, it just did not cope with the churn."

He added: "People waiting seven hours is just not acceptable, or that people were not able to complete transactions.

"We are taking this very seriously and are continuing to deal with it.

"We let a lot of people down which we are very sorry for."

Glasgow 2014 said no one will be able to join the website queue for tickets from 6pm, but people logged on before then "should be able to complete their session".

This morning, after closing the site for an hour overnight, organisers said there were "positive indications" the website was working.

But three hours later, Glasgow 2014 said: "As traffic has increased, we have seen some recurrence of issues people were having with the ticketing website."

One person trying to get tickets, Patrick McCafferty, wrote on Twitter: "Those who managed to get #glasgow2014tickets yesterday will also get, along with their tickets, a gold medal for this endurance event... "

Insidethegames was placed in an online queue for four hours and 50 minutes before being taken to the registration page when we tried to buy tickets today.

• Have you been having problems buying tickets? Or have you been able to get the tickets you wanted? Let us know by posting a comment below, or tweeting us @insidethegames.

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