U2 Fans Jam Phone Lines

If your phone went dead Monday night, blame it on the Irish rock band U2. About 26,000 tickets to two upcoming L.A. concerts sold out in approximately 3 1/2 hours.

Pacific Bell officials said Tuesday that about 1 million calls from U2 fans jammed the lines between 7 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. attempting to purchase tickets for U2’s shows at the 16,000-seat Los Angeles Sports Arena on April 12 and 13. The phone company acknowledged the calls that actually made it into the telephone network represented only a fraction of calls attempted on Monday night.

“Did we have problems?” said Larry Cox, state manager of public affairs at GTE California in Thousand Oaks. “You bet we did. As a result of the U2 rush, many customers experienced interruptions in their phone service. Many got no dial tone at all.”

The phone jam came as the result of U2’s unusual telephone-only order policy, which limited callers to two tickets each. The slow pace of the sellout--compared to 6- and 12-minute sellouts on the East Coast--is attributed to a new policy in which 450 Ticketmaster operators in five states cross-checked orders to ensure that no customer could buy more than two tickets on the same credit card.

“U2 is happy for the thousands of fans who got tickets and sorry for those left out of this show,” a U2 spokesman said Tuesday.