By JADE RUSSELL

Tribune Staff Reporter

jrussell@tribunemedia.net

JUNKANOO fans were left frustrated yesterday after the ALIV Events app crashed just minutes into ticket sales, with officials attributing the disruption to an unprecedented surge of online traffic.

Eager customers hoping to secure seats for the upcoming parades flooded the system shortly after sales opened at 10am. The app quickly became inaccessible, triggering confusion and complaints across social media. In a Facebook statement, ALIV acknowledged the outage, noting that the platform experienced an unusual volume of simultaneous purchases and that technicians were working urgently to resolve the issue.

Online reaction was swift, with many people complaining that recurrent technical failures had become an annual hallmark of Junkanoo ticketing.

“Every year it's the same BS,” one person said. “Y'all add 3k more tickets, so y'all didn't think 3k more customers will be on your ticket system?”

Another described the app as a “yearly joke”. Others worried that prime seating areas, including Rawson Square, would sell out before the system recovered.

Dwayne Davis, chief information officer for the Cable Bahamas Group of Companies, told The Tribune that the app had been stabilised after officials took the system offline, reoptimised it, and relaunched it. He said roughly 20,000 users attempted to log in simultaneously at 10am, far exceeding projections.

More than 3,000 additional Junkanoo tickets are available this year as the National Junkanoo Committee and ALIV expanded seating and upgraded the ALIV Events platform following persistent complaints about crashes, login failures, and tickets selling out within minutes. ALIV officials have said the platform has undergone significant improvements to deliver a more reliable experience.

Mr Davis said the ticketing surge may reflect this expanded inventory, but added that it was too early to determine how many tickets had already been sold.

As in previous years, tickets will feature unique QR codes. Buyers receive the QR code by email or through the app, and parade officials will scan the codes at entrances to verify entry. Mr Davis recalled that in 2022, officials encountered fraud involving screenshots of digital tickets being shared or resold.

“There are no paper tickets. There are no tickets via WhatsApp,” Mr Davis stressed. “Once you purchase a ticket on behalf of somebody else, you can only forward that ticket once.”

He added that while Rawson Square remains the most sought-after location, there are strong seating options across several sections of the route.