Digital Ticketing Company’s Untimely Outage Leaves College Football Fans Without Tickets

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By Simon Ogus

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The digital shift in nearly all facets of our lives has greatly accelerated since COVID times and one of those areas is many teams completely shifting to digital ticketing for fans entering the venue. While the benefits of this seem pretty clear, it is not without setbacks and that was put on full display during last week’s second Saturday of college football.

Paciolan, who is the main technology company responsible for the systems that schools use to manage their digital ticketing systems had a massive outage right at the worst time when many schools getting ready for kickoff throughout the day. This led to huge problems with swaths of fans unable to enter stadiums and even led to additional companies feeling affected as StubHub for example needed to suspend the selling of tickets on one of their busiest days of the year as fans were unable to use them.

Paciolan works with 125 schools and over 75% of the Power 5 schools according to their website, so not many schools were spared during this unprecedented outage. Multiple reports had the issues ending at around 4:30 PM EST, which is long after a number of games have been completed with many more getting underway seemingly every 15 minutes.

While digital ticketing has its ease and benefits, it also makes the ticketholder reliant on a third party they have no control over — which isn’t the case with a paper ticket for entry.

While outages like this have thankfully been uncommon to date; it could give pause to school’s full-on digital plans or ticketing and have contingency plans if outages like this ever occur on one of the biggest revenue days of the year for college athletics.