Harry Potter and the Cursed Child tickets cause havoc online

Tickets for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child were quickly snatched up by 150,000 preregistered fans within eight hours when they went on general release on Wednesday.  The organisers have extended its run til 2017, and tickets were on sale online to the general public today. The play will now go on until the 30th April 2017, much to the delight of the Potterheads everywhere. Ticket touters were reselling tickets within hours of them going on sale, with some selling for as much as £2,000.

But on Wednesday Twitter was awash  with fans expressing their frustration with the booking system which apparently had a three hour long queue and crashed, locking fans out of their baskets and preventing them from completing their purchase.

Tickets for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child went on sale to the public today Image by David Catchpole / CC BY 2.0

Cursed Child  is the eighth story in the Harry Potter series, and whilst fans were worried it might take the form of prequel, earlier in the month JK Rowling confirmed that it was a sequel set 19 years in the future. The tagline for the West End play is “The eighth story. 19 years later.” It is divided in two parts and fans had a couple of options for how they would best like to view it, which made the booking even more complex.

In 2014, 100,000 tickets sold for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet within three hours, making it the fastest-selling in theatre history until now. Twitter was a good place to take the pulse of your average Harry Potter fan.