2021 Y Dream Home (Image Credit: CFJC Today)

By James Peters

Y Dream Home Lottery

Organizers apologize as Kamloops Y Dream Home Lottery website crashes within moments of launch

May 4, 2021 | 11:28 AM

KAMLOOPS — Organizers of the 2021 Kamloops Y Dream Home Lottery are apologizing after overwhelming demand for tickets crashed the charity’s website Tuesday morning (May 4).

Tickets for the lottery went on sale at 9:00 Tuesday morning, but the sales website crashed just minutes later due to the amount of people trying to buy tickets.

Spokesman Bryce Herman told CFJC Today technicians began work immediately to get the site back up and running. As of about 11:00 a.m., the site was working again.

“Certainly not the way we wanted it to start. Certainly not the way [the technical team] wanted it to start, but they assure me they have stabilized the site,” said Herman. “We should be well on our way to be able to process those people who have been patiently or, in some cases, impatiently waiting, and we apologize for that.”

In recent years, the lottery has sold out of all tickets in a matter of days.

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“We know that we’re going to get some relatively heavy traffic — we know that from history — but this morning, within just a couple of short minutes, there was over $100,000 in transactions [the site was] trying to process,” said Herman. “It just exploded the system.”

The website is the only point of sale for tickets in 2021. Herman says that is due to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, as in-person sales would be potentially unsanitary and present difficulties for social distancing. Telephone sales would require a large quantity of operators and would not be as secure.

“[The demand] certainly makes your heart feel good, but it also doesn’t make your heart feel good when the system fails what you think is a fail-safe system,” Herman said. “Unfortunate from that point of view, but we’re certainly feeling good about the fact that we’re up and rolling again now.”

“We certainly hope that we can process the number who are sitting in the queue because there were a number of people waiting and continuing to hit refresh, refresh,” he continued. “We know there are people there and our analytics are showing us there are literally thousands of people in the queue waiting. We’re hoping that we’ll get those backlogs cleared up very quickly.”