THE SIDELINES : Cubs Mania Spawns Phone Gridlock
The phone company is apologizing to customers for a weekend circuit logjam created by Cubs fans trying to get postseason tickets.
The phone frenzy continued until the last tickets were sold at 11:45 p.m. Sunday. It reached its peak Friday evening, when scores of Illinois Bell Telephone Co. customers trying to use the phone for other reasons could not even get a dial tone.
From 6 p.m. to midnight Friday--the first day of the weekend lottery--more than 9 million attempts were made to call the TicketMaster number for 84,000 postseason Cubs tickets, authorities said.
More than 25 million calls were made to the number by the end of the three-day telephone lottery, jamming phone circuits and disrupting service in parts of Chicago and northwestern Indiana, Bell officials said.
“This problem was caused by the unprecedented level of demand” for Cubs tickets, said Bell spokeswoman Pat Montgomery. “We did not foresee this.”
Callers were hoping to get seats to the National League championship series and the World Series.
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