VANCOUVER - Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee officials knew they had a problem Saturday the instant they turned on their ticketing system for what was supposed to be the final round of 2010 Olympic ticket sales.

However, it was some three hours later, after many fuming would-be buyers flooded social-media venues with their frustrations that Vanoc informed consumers what the problem was and that the online sale would be delayed a week until Nov. 14.

Caley Denton, Vanoc's vice-president of ticketing, described it as problem with the connection between the virtual waiting room on the website and the transaction portion of the site where people actually make their purchases.

"It was more of a configuration issue between the virtual waiting room and the site itself," Denton said, adding that it is something they have never seen before.

"I haven't had a good explanation yet as to how that happened."

He added that Vanoc's official ticket-service provider, Tickets.com, was able to resolve the problem Saturday, but Vanoc officials decided to postpone the sale rather than "pushing it through something that wasn't working well."

Denton said Vanoc was able to sell a few hundred tickets over its telephone lines, and now Vanoc is committed to replace those tickets with the pool of "Olympic family" tickets it is still holding back for the same events so it will still have 100,000 tickets to sell during the re-try Nov. 14.

However, while Vanoc attempted to resolve the issue, frustrations of ticket buyers looking for information on what was happening piled up on the popular social media website Twitter as soon as the problem first cropped up.

Winter Olympic fans queued up on Vanoc's website with mixed results, which all ended in failure.

If they were lucky, users received an apology message noting heavy traffic on the site and asking them to try back later. Others were unable to log on to the site at all.

Some users reported being able to navigate through the waiting room, select tickets and put them in their purchase baskets only to have the site crash before they could complete their purchases, and characterized it all, in Internet parlance, an 'epic fail'.

"This was a fiasco of grand proportions," said Dennis Arne, an expatriate Canadian just moving back to Canada after a long period in Australia. "And there's no doubt they feel the same way."

Arne tried to log on right at 10 a.m. only to run into an "internal server error" message in his web browser.

Eventually the Vanoc ticketing site did start to load in his browser, but took an hour-and-a-half to complete. And once he tried to navigate to the event schedule, the site crashed again.

"I think I just wanted information about what was happening, why the site was down," Arne said.

"If the site was down, I guess there's no way they can notify people, [but] perhaps they could have sent an e-mail earlier on in the piece letting people know they were experiencing difficulties.

Renee Smith Valade, Vanoc's vice-president of communications, said her communications team did use Twitter to get messages out that they were experiencing problems.

"We put out as much information as we felt we could say at the time," Smith Valade said.

Vanoc's initial messages through Twitter made reference to heavy traffic on the site and that technicians were working on resolving the problem, so users should "hang in there."

Smith Valade said that officials wanted to make sure that if they were putting information out it was accurate, and if there was a decision to postpone the sale, they knew when the alternate date would be before they said anything.

"At a certain point, you put your resources into developing final, confirmed information, such as a news release and other forms of communication," she added.

Smith Valade said once they had that information confirmed, Vanoc sent it out via e-mail to the "hundreds of thousands" of ticket-account holders who they knew were trying to access the site, posted the information on its website and distributed to the media.

Over the next week, Smith Valade said Vanoc will work to make sure the alternative ticket-sale date is publicized at least as well as the original date.

She added that they will also review their use of Twitter and other social media to consider whether they might use it differently in the future.

Arne, however, will be out of luck for the second date. The geologist will be on an airplane next Saturday traveling back to Australia to help bring his family back to Canada.