The Fringe's technical woes seem to know no end. Yesterday, with days to go to the start of its preview shows, the Fringe Office announced that it would be closed for the day for ticket sales over the counter and by telephone (see Fringe Shutting Shop story). It was the third time that the organisation has had to stop ticket sales to deal with its ongoing ticketing crisis. However, in yesterday's statement on the front page of its web site, it promised that "all website sales will continue as normal."
However, since the early hours of this morning the Fringe web site has been unavailable.
Visitors to the web site found two lines of code that suggest a database error has occured. The problem, which was finally fixed just after 10am, appears to have occured in the site's user forums.
A few Fringe venues - such as the Big Four (Assembly, the Pleasance, the Gilded Balloon, and Underbelly) - have independent ticketing sytems which have been unaffected by the technical problems.