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The Sundance Film Festival is still on, but tickets for the Park City shindig aren’t available, at least for now.

“Our apologies, but the ticket sale will remain closed for the day,” announced the Robert Redford founded fest online this afternoon after a day of site crashes, lost purchases and a lot of hitting of the return button on a lot of keyboards. “Sales will open back up tomorrow, Friday January 13 at 12:00pm MT,” the Sundance site and social media feeds added.

In the first in-person Sundance in three pandemic filled years and with one week to go before the official 2023 kick-off, problems started early Thursday. With single ticket sales starting off today, there was a massive amount of traffic on the Sundance site in the early hours of the day, I hear.

Too much traffic clearly.

“We experienced a technical issue with ticketing today,” a Sundance spokesperson told Deadline as the site went colder than the winter wind that whips down Park City’s Main Street in January. “Our apologies to those who were impacted.”

In terms of impact, would-be film goers found the site slow Thursday to pick tickets and turning to digital slush when it came to checkout and confirmation. Then the problems extended to log-ins, with potential customers suddenly becoming a new user when they signed on again in the hopes of resetting the frustrating process.

While not the first time in the festival’s long history that online ticket sales have hit a snag or two and certainly nothing like the 2017 cyberattack that shut the whole place down for several hours,. Today’s “technical issue” seemed to leave Sundance IT flummoxed. After a couple of hours of Twitter placating as the complaints piled up, the festival team simply said – we’re trying:

At 3:06 PM PT, trying turned to we’e done for the day folks

Hope springing external that everything is sorted out in the AM, Sundance officials tell me that they will give festival attendees a heads up Friday if there are more problems with the site.

Keep those winter gloved fingers crossed.

The 2023 Sundance Film Festival runs from January 19 -29.

Mike Fleming contributed to this report



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