6 August 2021

A little like Glastonbury…

We broke the internet! We are two weeks into the summer holidays and are learning by experience that you just can’t think of everything. Our online ticketing system is too! We are releasing tickets one week at at a time, rather than the whole summer at once. Managing capacity this way protects our customers from being becoming victims of the pingdemic that is gripping countrywide, and the Museum, from having to refund more than a few days tickets in the unfortunate event we have to close because of staff shortages. 

This creates unintentionally a spike in demand every week on a Thursday evening, when we release the allocation for the week ahead, as people determined to get their hands on tickets… and they proceed to try and book them.  On Thursday 5th August, demand exceeded expectations and the available bandwidth of our host servers and the whole site crashed… that’s the whole site, not just our booking page. Hundreds of messages and emails later, and the page is fixed but the air must have been blue at our host servers.

We will continue to release the allocation weekly but at an unspecifed time on a Thursday or Friday, dependent on staffing – we are after all a small team.

The precise time will remain a mystery and just another well guarded secret at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic!

The online booking system is here to stay – we can this way limit numbers and remain safely within the HSE Risk Assessment for maximum capacity during the pandemic that we have in operation at the Museum, keeping you safe and helping the museum to survive after the awful loses of 2020….

Thank you for reading!

The MWM Team.