Colorado Rockies World Series Ticket Sales Halted By Attack?

Since MX Logic is based out of Denver, I have an acute interest in the Rockies' advancement to the World Series to face the Boston Red Sox. From a personal standpoint, I also grew up just outside of New York City and as such grew up a Yankees fan (the only team that I like more than the Rockies) so I also have a pretty sour taste for anything having to do with the boys from Fenway.

Anyway, tickets for Games 3-5 of the World Series were supposed to go on sale today via the Rockies' Web Site. Quickly after the sale started, however the ecommerce site (hosted by a company called Paciolan) crashed and crashed hard. Of the 20,000 seats that were available for each game and were expected to be sold, only about 500 seats total were purchased before the site went down. According to reports from Paciolan, there were 8.5 million hits to the Rockies' web site after tickets went on sale.

Most of the afternoon passed and there were no updates from neither the Rockies nor from Paciolan as to the cause of the outage nor when tickets would go on sale again. Finally, this evening it was announced that an "external malicious attack" caused a system-wide outage with Paciolan.

Call me a cynic, but I have some serious doubts as it relates to this claim.

First, shouldn't a site that handles ecommerce transactions for schools like the Universities of Michigan and Southern California and Florida State as well as professional baseball franchises such as the Rockies, Padres, and Phillies be able to handle more than 8.5 million hits? Either way, the article states that the *** Rockies' web site *** sustained 8.5 million hits, NOT Paciolan. There is a difference even though one could reasonably assume that most people who were visiting the web site were there attempting to purchase tickets.

Second, hackers have bigger fish to fry than trying to take down the Colorado Rockies' web site when World Series tickets go on sale. Hackers are financially motivated. Plain and simple! If this was an attack, not only did the person who orchestrated it not stand to make any money off of the deal, but this wasn't exactly the type of attack that would make the underground community take notice of you either.