A day after demand for tickets for the 2008 Olympics crashed a computer crash, the Beijing organizers apologize and admitted they underestimated the demand for tickets. The website selling tickets received an amazing 20 million hits in three hours.

Personally, I find that a little hard to believe. As organized as the organizers have been, you would think they would have thought about how to handle the purchasing of tickets. Even more, the demand for Olympic tickets is always high, especially for the popular events such as gymnastics and track and field.

"The Beijing Olympic Ticketing Centre underestimated the peoples' enthusiasm for the Games. We sincerely apologize to the general public for the inconvenience," director of the centre Rong Jun told a news conference.

In addition to the millions of applicants swamping the Web site, the call centre received 3.8 million calls and lengthy queues formed at the 1,000 designated branches of the Bank of China, Rong said.

"All this exceeded the processing capacity of the system," he added. "It was due to the database processing, not the bandwidth. We need to improve the database capacity.

"We are negotiating with the technical staff for a more comprehensive system."

The Web site had a capacity to deal with one million hits an hour, Rong said, while the booking system should have been able to sell 150,000 tickets an hour.

Rong said organizers were aware that many people had taken a day off work and made other sacrifices to try to buy tickets and read out a letter of apology to subscribers.

"We did not provide satisfactory work," it read in part. "We will provide a reasonable solution to the problem and hope the public continue to support our work."