For the third year in a row, malicious outside activity may have caused the massive failure of the Brown Marketplace as students attempted to purchase Spring Weekend tickets yesterday, said Mike Caron '12, director of the Brown Student Agencies management team. The Brown Concert Agency made tickets available at 8 a.m., but only around 40 students successfully completed their purchases before the agency decided to end sales at 8:45 a.m., said BCA Co-Chair Sandy Ryza '12. Students will still be able to purchase tickets today and tomorrow.
Malicious software was the probable cause of the extreme loading lag between screens that many ticket buyers noticed yesterday morning, Caron said.
"I feel like they let us through to another screen every 10 minutes or so just to keep hope up the slightest bit. It's like why they let there be a victor in the Hunger Games," one student's Facebook status read.
That lag prompted BCA to stop sales early out of concerns that students who had morning classes would not be able to purchase tickets.
"We didn't want anyone to have an unfair advantage in buying Spring Weekend tickets," Ryza said.
Caron said representatives of the TouchNet server that handles ticket sales were "working on the problem all day long to try to figure out what happened."
Based on a similarity between this year's crash and crashes in previous years, he said it seemed likely malicious software had caused the malfunction, but that that suspicion has not been confirmed.
As to what the source of the software might have been, "I couldn't even speculate. I don't have a clue," Caron said. "No one does. It's obviously someone local, or someone with a knowledge of what goes on here at Brown, but other than that ..."
Student reaction to the site crash ranged from mild anger to joking acceptance.
"I just thought the situation was kind of hilarious," said Srihari Sritharan '12. "The last two or three years I've gone to Spring Weekend I've woken up at 10 a.m. to buy my tickets and never had a problem. This year, I was especially excited about Childish Gambino so I woke up early, was about to buy my tickets ... and then suddenly my (online shopping) cart didn't exist."
"It was like, I made it to a certain point, and then the site just decided, 'Nope. You don't pass here. You're done,'" he added, laughing.
Dave Caianiello '14 said he had Marketplace open on both his phone and his laptop. He estimated he refreshed his browser more than 150 times to try to buy tickets.
"I had an 8:30 class, and everyone brought their computer," he said. "You could just see them on Marketplace hitting 'refresh' over and over."
Christy Chao '14 was one of the roughly 40 students who was able to purchase their tickets this morning. She seemed unfazed by her accomplishment.
"No one else was able to buy tickets?" she asked. "Weird. I don't think I did anything special. ... I guess I just got really lucky."
Students who vented their frustration with BSA on Facebook had their posts grouped under the label Birmingham Small Arms Company - a defunct major motorcycle, firearm and machine production conglomerate in the United Kingdom - thanks to the social networking site's function aggregating posts by topic.
Caron said TouchNet employees will work to try to prevent a similar problem during ticket sales today, but he emphasized that the cyclical relationship between hackers and software security providers makes it difficult to stop malicious attacks from happening.
"It's a back-and-forth. As soon as we figure out how to make the security system better, they find a way to break through, and then we stall them again," he said.
The University has a contract with TouchNet, and Caron said discussing whether the University would maintain that contract would be "pure speculation" on his part.
But he added that when the University looks to renew its contract with TouchNet, the annual ticket glitch "would be a point that comes up" in discussions.
"But BSA, BCA, Financial Services ... everyone within Brown is doing everything they can to stop this," he said. "This problem does not stem from a lack of effort."
