When the booking system for the second round of Olympic tickets crashed early Tuesday, many Beijingers were in a nostalgic mood after wasting hours in stuffy bank lines.

"China has such a large population that it is not suitable to sell the tickets on a 'first come, first served' basis," said white-collar worker Dai Le. "Lottery results are much easier to accept," he added, referring to the previous method used.

The crash prompted officials to release an apology at midnight declaring the temporarily halt of domestic sales.

"Because of the overwhelming volume of page visits, the technical system was unable to perform the tasks well enough, and many applicants were unable to successfully submit their applications," said the BOCOG statement. "We sincerely apologize to the public."

New ticketing policies are expected on Monday.

The second stage promised to offer 1.85 million tickets via three channels: a booking website, a hotline and designated branches of Bank of China.

Sadly, demand and the limits of Chinese servers proved bad bedfellows and the plan fell apart at the seams.

The official ticketing website was pummeled by 8 million hits in the first hour from 9.00 am, while the ticketing hotline received 3.8 million calls.

This resulted in only 43,000 tickets being sold before things went kaput.

"Our system could only handle one million hits an hour, or 150,000 bookings an hour," said Rong Jun, director of the center.

"We are considering to upgrade our system and modify our ticketing policies to solve the problem in the new policy."