A spokesperson for the , which is owned by Emap, said that it had had some 2m hits in the first five minutes when it opened at 8pm on Thursday night. This compares with 300,000 hits during the first 24 hours of tickets going on sale last year.
It had prepared for the ticket sale by adding extra servers and bringing in more than 100 staff to handle telephone sales. However hundreds of music fans have failed to get through despite trying online and via telephone throughout the night.
Aloud.com also blamed its new policy of only allowing buyers to purchase two tickets each, which slows down the system. The purpose of this is to prevent ticket touts from buying huge numbers of tickets to sell on at higher prices, but has lead to thousands more transactions.
The spokesperson said: "Glastonbury could sell out four times over, there are always going to be disappointed people. There's been an unbelievable amount of interest."
Michael Eavis, organiser of Glastonbury, said: "Just too many people want to come, it is very difficult for all of it to run smoothly."
Tickets have already appeared on Ebay, although how many of them are from genuine sellers at this point seems debatable.
This year's festival is being headlined by Oasis and Paul McCartney. Aloud.com said that its priority for now was to get the tickets sold and once the process is finished, it would review the ticketing policy in the run-up to next year's festival.
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