So Monday night I did something I haven't done since I was about fourteen: I sat on the couch, phone in hand, watching the clock, waiting for tickets to go on sale for a movie that doesn't come out until December. The Force Awakens presale opened at midnight after that big trailer drop during Monday Night Football, and within about four minutes the whole thing turned into a demonstration of exactly how much modern ticketing infrastructure cannot handle a real spike in traffic.
Fandango's app just... stopped. Not an error message, not a spinner, just a blank white screen that sat there mocking me. I switched to the mobile site and got a "Bad Request" page that looked like it hadn't been touched since 2009. My buddy Dan was trying through AMC's own site at the same time and said it kept bouncing him back to the homepage every time he picked seats, like it was actively trying to lose his order. Movietickets.com apparently just tipped over entirely for a while. This is a company whose entire business is selling movie tickets online, on a night they knew, months in advance, was going to be enormous. Not exactly a surprise pop-up sale.
I ended up getting seats around 12:40am, for a Thursday night showing in the second week of December, not even opening night, because by the time anything actually loaded the good slots were gone. $14.50 a ticket at my local theater, which still feels like a lot for a chair, but whatever, it's Star Wars. My other option was a 10:45pm show two days later that had exactly two seats left in the very front row, and I'm too old for front row anymore, my neck was never the same after the last time I did that for a midnight showing back in 2008.
What gets me is that this happens basically every single time now and nobody seems to actually fix it. Big product drop, big ticket sale, big console launch day, doesn't matter what it is, the sites fall over and everyone just shrugs and says "well, demand was really high." Sure. But you knew that. You had a countdown clock on your own homepage counting down to this exact moment. Provisioning for a predictable traffic spike isn't some impossible engineering mystery, it's just not a priority until enough people are angry on Twitter about it, and even then the fix seems to be "buy some more servers for one night" rather than actually building something that scales.
Also, only tangentially related, but I'm still a little bit stuck on Wednesday's Back to the Future Day stuff, specifically the Nike self-lacing shoe reveal. Nike Mag, the actual real version of the shoes from Part II, exists now, they showed it off, and I got genuinely excited for about ninety seconds before reading the fine print: only 89 pairs exist, they're being auctioned off on eBay with proceeds going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and normal humans cannot just buy a pair. Which, fine, it's for a good cause and I'm not going to complain about Parkinson's research funding. But every headline made it sound like self-lacing sneakers were a thing you could now go buy, and that's not really what happened. It's a charity auction for an incredibly small batch of shoes. Feels like the same instinct as the ticket sale thing honestly, this gap between what gets announced with a lot of excitement and what actually exists for a regular person to go get.
Anyway. I've got a Thursday in December marked on my calendar now, my thumb is a little sore from refreshing an app for forty straight minutes, and I've decided I'm just going to expect every big online sale to be broken from now on and be pleasantly surprised on the rare occasion it isn't. Popcorn's going to cost more than the ticket at this point, that's a separate rant for another night.