London 2012 Olympics

Olympic Games organisers suffered fresh embarrassment when their ticketing website struggled to process applications for 1.4million seats for the London 2012 football tournament.

Despite assurances on Sunday that the problems that had crashed the ticket website in January had been resolved, potential purchasers yesterday were alarmed to encounter repeated “error” messages and long delays in authorising payments.

It will raise fears over whether the website can cope with the final crucial sale of Olympic tickets – about a million ‘contingency’ seats at the most popular events and the ceremonies – due to be released later this month.

Chris Townsend, the commercial director of the Games organising committee, and Ticketmaster chief executive Chris Edmonds had both expressed confidence that the ticketing system, believed to be about a decade old, had been upgraded ­sufficiently to handle up to 250,000 applications an hour.

However, fans wishing to buy tickets for games at Old Trafford and those featuring Team GB found that some seats shown as available generated a “request failed” message at the final payment point. Sophie Johnson, told Telegraph Sport the process was “shambolic”.

She said: “After a painful 25 minutes of waiting to see if the tickets I had selected were available, I proceeded to confirm payment details, the processing of which took a further 15 minutes, only to be informed that there had been an error. I tried again, same issue.”

Telrgraph