The California Governor and First Lady's Conference on Women sold out in a record two hours Monday morning, organizers said.
Demand was so high that many people could not log on to the website to buy tickets to the events.
"We doubled our server capacity this year in anticipation of very high demand," said event spokeswoman Marissa Moss. "We received hundreds of thousands of simultaneous requests at 9 a.m., and it overwhelmed our servers.
"Thousands of people did make it into the ticket queue before the servers crashed and were able to fulfill their ticket requests."
Some called the Press-Telegram with complaints that they could not get through.
Passes to the main conference, which is Oct. 27, sold out, as did tickets for "A Day of Transformation," a new event, on Oct. 26.
Tickets remain for the Oct. 26 "Night and the Village" and the Oct. 27 "Minerva Awards" honoring humanitarians.
Last year, tickets were gone in three hours.
First lady Maria Shriver, the event organizer, last week announced a marquee list of speakers from the worlds of politics, entertainment, media and business.
Expected to draw 25,000 people over the two days to the Long Beach Convention Center and Arena, the annual event is the biggest of its kind in the nation.
Speakers include CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson, attorney Caroline Kennedy, former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, singers Alicia Keys and Shakira, actresses Kelly Preston and Susan Saint James, attorney and author Elizabeth Edwards, photographer Annie Leibovitz and race car driver Danica Patrick.
For more information, visit www.womensconference.org.
I'm too disappointed! Spent 3 hrs 15 minutes hitting "refresh" & could never get in to buy--considering I live in LB, it would've been nice to actually be able to attend. One friend who got to go last year suggested that they allow attendees from the prior year only (not all previous years) to have an advance purchase date for the initial 25% of registration, then local zip code radius the next 25% (like Disneyland does for SoCal locals) & then open the remaining tickets to be sold...Guess I'll be trying to find tickets 4 sale from anyone who bought a block of tickets!
I'm too disappointed! Spent 3 hrs 15 minutes hitting "refresh" & could never get in to buy--considering I live in LB, it would've been nice to actually be able to attend. One friend who got to go last year suggested that they allow attendees from the prior year only (not all previous years) to have an advance purchase date for the initial 25% of registration, then local zip code radius the next 25% (like Disneyland does for SoCal locals) & then open the remaining tickets to be sold...Guess I'll be trying to find tickets 4 sale from anyone who bought a block of tickets!