Hamilton Digital Lottery Website Crashes on Maiden Flight Due to Demand; Going Back to Live Lottery Jan. 6

"Service Unavailable. Please try again later." That's what potential ticket buyers saw on the new website set up to handle the Hamilton discount lottery for much of its first day, Jan. 5. The site returned briefly at 4 PM, but went down again after a reported total of 50,000 applicants rushed the site for the 21 available seats in the front row.



As a result, the Jan. 5 discount lottery was cancelled and producers announced that they would return to a live lottery outside the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Jan. 6.

The site, Lottery.broadwaydirect.com/show/hamilton, was set up in the wake of the Jan. 4 announcement that Hamilton's daily $10 discount lottery in front of the Richard Rodgers Theatre was attracting so many people that the crowd was causing a potential public danger. Producers announced that they were moving the lottery online until a better system could be created, at at date to be determined in the spring.

However, the site was quickly overwhelmed on its first day of operation. Producers promised that the site would be up again as of 4 PM, which it was. But it quickly sank under the weight of additional applicants.

As of 4:37 PM the show tweeted that the system was overwhelmed and there would be no lottery Jan. 5:

Due to over 50K unique entries, @BroadwayDirect's lottery site has fully crashed. As a result, we cannot award any #Ham4Ham winners tonight. — Hamilton (@HamiltonMusical) January 5, 2016

Shortly afterward the show tweeted that the live lottery will return Jan. 6:

Tomorrow, while we work on remedying this problem, we will hold LIVE #Ham4Ham lotteries outside of the theater. Stay tuned for more details. — Hamilton (@HamiltonMusical) January 5, 2016

In addition, the show tweeted that the discount seats—some of the most valuable theatrical real estate in the country—would go unused Tuesday night:

The tickets held for #Ham4Ham will go unsold and unused in an effort to be fair to everyone. https://t.co/lPZOE5k20v — Hamilton (@HamiltonMusical) January 5, 2016

*gets up, slaps on game face* ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the unplanned Ham4ham show tomorrow! 5:55! https://t.co/JEhxKFK5uK — Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) January 5, 2016

The New York production wasn't the only one having problems. The phone system for taking group sales for the upcoming Chicago production of Hamilton also crashed Jan. 5 due to overwhelming demand: