Graduates at Sidney Sussex were denied the opportunity to apply for dining tickets at the college’s May Ball due to a system failure.

About 100 dining tickets for the college’s May Ball went on presale yesterday, but problems with the online ordering form meant that none of the graduates at the college could get them after the tickets sold out within 15 minutes of being put online.

By the time the error had been corrected, all of the dining tickets had been sold out with only non-dining tickets, including VIP tickets, on sale.

However, some graduate students are still reporting problems accessing the system as much as 12 hours on from the problem being reported.

With a large proportion of the graduates on one year courses, this represented the only opportunity for them to get tickets for the Sidney May Ball, which is held every two years.

In an email to the affected students, May Ball President Jack Scannell wrote:

"Dear Graduates,

I am writing to you as President of the 2012 May Ball Committee to formally
apologise for an error in our online ordering form which meant that some
members of the Sidney graduate community were unable to access the ticket
ordering form for the first fifteen minutes of the Sidney pre-sale.

Extensive testing of the order form was undertaken beforehand, but
unfortunately failed to detect this error. Once we were notified of the
error, it was corrected as soon as possible; this unfortunately meant that,
whilst those excluded at first were able to buy non-dining tickets, the
limited number of dining tickets had sold out.

Due to logistical and budgetary constraints, the committee is unable to
extend the dining provision for this year's ball.

We would once more like to apologise to all those affected by this error,
and have taken steps to ensure that there are greater safeguards next year.

Best wishes,
Jack"

In another email in response to complaints from one postgraduate student, Jack said that he is, “unwilling to cancel all successful dining tickets in order to resolve this problem - I don't see this as fair to those who successfully bought dining tickets, and feel this would only further complicate the situation.”

He will be meeting today with members of the committee and the graduate community to discuss and try and resolve the issue.