Invicta FCs’ first-ever online pay-per-view offering was marred by technical difficulties, but Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable wants to make it perfectly clear the all-female MMA promotion was not to blame.

“First off, let me just say how apologetic and sorry we are for what happened for the fans,” Hunstable today told MMAjunkie.com Radio (www.mmajunkie.com/radio). “I’m a big MMA fan. I’ve been in the community for years, and I don’t like it when any of our broadcasters have issues, let alone a sport that I love and am passionate about. I take it especially serious, especially in this case.

“Unfortunately what happened was – and the issue was on Ustream’s end, it was not on Invicta’s end – was that believe it or not, our payment system, which is in sort of a beta program at the moment, got overloaded.”

Invicta FC 4 took place this past Saturday, Jan. 5, at Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kan. After the promotion’s offered its first three events as free online streams, Invicta FC 4 was scheduled as the promotion’s first PPV event with the 13-fight card offered live on Ustream for $7.95. (Full disclosure: Ustream is also MMAjunkie.com Radio’s streaming partner.)

Unfortunately for the promotion, many fans found it impossible to log in to the website and submit their payment. Others who did pay complained of an unstable feed. The myriad of issues led Invicta FC CEO Shannon Knapp to take down the paywall and offer the event for free. Additionally, refunds are being offered to those who did pay.

Hunstable said the event was the most popular PPV event in Ustream history, and the traffic load was the reason for the technical issues.

“There were too many tickets being sold,” Hunstable said. “We’ve done lots of pay-per-views over the last year, from the UFC to the Rugby World Cup to working with World Cup-qualifying soccer matches. The load of tickets being sold, we just hadn’t seen a level of that to date, and that’s ultimately what happened.

“I’ve seen the data myself. It’s pretty clear that this was the most popular pay-per-view that we’ve seen on Ustream.”

Hunstable declined to offer specific numbers in terms of paying customers, but Knapp told MMAjunkie.com that approximately 3,000 pre-sale purchases were processed and that approximately 70,000 viewers initially joined the stream once the paywall was taken down. The Invicta CEO declined comment on any potential fallout from the lost revenue.

Knapp and her promotion are currently seeking a TV partner, but it’s unknown if a new broadcast plan will be in place for Invicta FC 5, which is expected to take place in April. Hunstable said his company would love to work with the promotion again and that technological lessons were immediately learned and will be addressed in all future PPV events on the site.

“As a technology company, you invest in your infrastructure,” Hunstable said. “We’ve obviously spent a lot of money and time making those decisions. We just had not seen a pace of ticket sales at this speed, so we were caught a little bit off-guard.

“We don’t expect this to happen again. It’s something that’s a fairly straightforward fix from out standpoint. Unfortunately, we just had never encountered an event of this size and scale. We’ve got to make some changes, and we’ll make those changes over the coming days. We don’t expect any issues moving forward.”

For her part, Knapp has remained mostly positive in the face of a difficult situation. And while the promotion certainly lost significant potential revenue, she believes there are still silver linings to observe.

“I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, and that was the data to support what I’ve been trying to tell everybody,” she said. “Did we lose a ton of revenue? I would definitely say we did, with the data that’s available. But we’ve got to keep moving forward, and hopefully, we’re going to secure a broadcast partner that will give us a stable platform to continue to deliver an amazing product.”

For more on Invicta FC 4, including the night’s official results, check out the MMA Events section of the site.

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(Steven Marrocco contributed to this report.)