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 last 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. At the time of writing, Aloud.com had dealt with double the number of transactions than last year and had already sold 73,000 tickets out of 115,000.
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 and we're still getting 2,500 hits a minute."
Michael Eavis, organiser of Glastonbury, said: "Just too many people want to come, it is very difficult for all of it to run smoothly."
The festival's attempts to block touts from selling tickets to the event appear to have failed, with one seller already on eBay who appears to be offering genuine tickets. The highest bid at the time of writing was 拢920 for the pair.
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.
If you have an opinion on this or any other issue raised on Brand Republic, join the debate in the .