VIA Rail's $150 Youth Pass sold out in hours and the Internet is coming after them

Mar 30 2017, 8:16 pm

“How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago…” 
Louis CK

It looks like VIA Rail couldn’t keep up with the speed of the internet.

Offering a deal that seemed too good to be true – $150 unlimited rail travel for the month of July – VIA’s website first felt the painful rush of the internet in the form of a crash, rendering the pass momentarily unavailable:

Sales were then “suspended” while VIA figured out what to do with the high demand, posting this message to their website:

Due to high demand, sales of the Canada 150 Youth Pass are temporarily suspended. VIA Rail is pleasantly surprised by Canadians’ enthusiasm to take part in the Canada 150 celebrations, and the popularity of this product. VIA Rail’s technical teams are working to find the source of the problem. VIA Rail is sorry for the inconvenience the situation may have caused. All efforts are being deployed to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. More information will follow once the situation has been resolved.

before they came back online to announce that the pass was now available for purchase:

However, only 1,867 passes would now be available (in ‘honour’ of the year of Canada’s birth…), and the internet was not having it.

Of course, it wasn’t simply that the campaign had crashed, then limited itself, then sold out all in one day that had Canadians up in arms. It was also the fact that the deal limited itself to those between ages 12 and 25:

One thing’s for sure, if you are one of the lucky 1,867 people who did get a ticket, you’re probably very, very happy. And if you’re not, well, you probably feel a lot more like the people tweeting about it below…

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