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Hull's City of Culture firework freebie flares up

More of a whimper than bang as website dishing out tickets crashes

A stampede for free tickets to Hull’s UK City of Culture fireworks display this morning brought the website offering them to its knees – still, the organisers only had nearly four years to prepare.

The northeast enclave, whose digital hub is said to be blossoming, was told in 2013 that 2017 would be the city's year in the limelight with celebrations of its art, people, history and "unique character" lined up.

The launch event, a fireworks display in the marina, kicks off on 1 January and 15,000 free tickets were dangled in front on the public from 8am on Wednesday.

But event organiser, The Culture Company – a independent organisation with charitable status – revealed on Twitter at the start time that "due to the volume of traffic to our site, we’re having a few technical difficulties".

Visitors were then placed in a queue to "manage traffic to the site" – El Reg jumped on the webpage at 8.30am, was assigned a queue number of 6,563 with 5,000 odd applicants ahead of us. We were scheduled to claim our free tickets at 10.27 but they had already gone.

Of course frustrated punters did what frustrated punters do in this digital era – they headed to Twitter.

And here...

And here too...

But fear not! If you missed out on this round, a batch of 10,000 free tickets will be up for grabs on 11 November, so you can go through the whole process again. ®

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