New Webinar: Modernising Without Destabilising: How Bread Financial Is Building Confidence Through Change

Learn more

New webinar with Bread Financial

Learn more
Contact us
Blogs

West Ham FC Ticketing Website Gets the Red Card

<span id="hs_cos_wrapper_name" class="hs_cos_wrapper hs_cos_wrapper_meta_field hs_cos_wrapper_type_text" style="" data-hs-cos-general-type="meta_field" data-hs-cos-type="text" >West Ham FC Ticketing Website Gets the Red Card</span>

Date 29 June 2026

Author Team Capacitas

On Thursday 4th February 2016, West Ham United Football Club's official ticketing system, http://www.whufcboxoffice.com, was displaying the following queuing page to visitors:

 

Website Load Testing

We noticed this after seeing an advert in the morning Metro newspaper. The advert was informing readers that it was potentially their last chance to purchase FA Cup tickets at the Boleyn Ground before the team move to the Olympic Stadium next season. In particular there was an FA Cup replay fixture against Liverpool with available tickets.

 

Website Response Times

 

This is likely to be one of the causes for the upsurge in traffic to the website. I have currently been ‘In the queue’ for several hours and counting. This suggests there are potentially some real underlying issues with the site. In other attempts to access the site we were presented with the following page:

 

Website Capacity Monitoring

 The queuing page would have been put in place by the website, in an attempt to control the level of traffic. West Ham fans displayed their anger at the club via twitter.

Capacity and Performance Planning Tools

 

If you want to find out how to avoid this happening to your own website then please read our article with some top tips:

https://www.capacitas.co.uk/blog/why-do-so-many-websites-fail-on-black-friday

If you would like to learn more about our Prepare for Peak and Performance testing solutions, please click below, to see our latest Ebook.

 
Team Capacitas
About the author

Team Capacitas

Capacitas is a cloud and AI value partner. We translate rapid technological change into enduring commercial advantage by converting every unit of compute into enterprise value.

FinOps and AI: Financial Discipline for Enterprise AI

Learn how FinOps extends to enterprise AI, connecting financial, technical and product decisions to manage spending and measure returns. blogs-(new)-post

Read insight

Confidence Under Load: How We Verified AKS Readiness for Peak

How Capacitas verified AKS readiness for peak demand by validating workload performance, autoscaling, cluster capacity, monitoring, and incident response. blogs-(new)-post

Read insight

Building Cloud Resilience: Lessons from the AWS Outage

Learning from the Latest Outage. Events like this week’s AWS disruption highlight one clear truth: resilience must be designed, not assumed. blogs-(new)-post

Read insight

Bringing Order to Chaos: A Practical Guide to Chaos Testing in the Cloud

Build a structured approach to cloud chaos testing with the right tools, realistic failure scenarios, clear hypotheses and focused analysis of results. blogs-(new)-post

Read insight
Get an edge on insight. Know first. Move first. Get a technology edge.. Sign Up Get an edge on insight. Know first. Move first. Get a technology edge.. Sign Up

Get updates and insights.

Sign up