Liza Minnelli Crashes Sydney Opera House Website!

This happened Thursday, the day before yesterday, when fans eager to buy tickets for her show descended on the Sidney Opera House website in droves and brought it to its knees.

The Daily Telegraph has this to say about it:

WE'RE sure it has absolutely nothing to do with Sydney being the gay capital of the nation but interest in pre-sales for Liza Minnelli's Sydney concert tour crashed the Sydney Opera House's website yesterday.

The site went down at midday, with interest in the two Sydney shows - on October 16 and 17 - so great it took tech staff hours to get the site up and running again.

Minnelli, the daughter of legendary singer and movie star Judy Garland, will be accompanied by her 12-piece orchestra when she tours.

I'm not so sure the gay community had nothing to do with it nor am I sure this gratuitous reference had any place in the article. However, this pattern of websites crashing when tickets go on sale seems to be evident all over (see the Jonas Brothers incident from the week before).

Obviously the Sidney Opera House website could have used a CapCal CloudBurst test to tell them at what level it would begin to strain, at which point the Amazon EC2 cloud could come to the rescue by providing the extra capacity on demand (i.e., "cloudbursting").

We're going to be trying this with a large e-commerce site in Sao Paulo, Brazil and I'll be faithfully reporting the results. So please stay tuned!