An elderly woman reads a brochure while waiting in a line for purchasing tickets for next year's Beijing Olympics in a branch of Bank of China in Beijing, Oct. 30, 2007. (Xinhua Photo)

People ask a bank consultant about purchasing tickets for next year's Beijing Olympics in a branch of Bank of China in Beijing, capital of China on Oct. 30, 2007. Some 1.85 million tickets for next year's Beijing Olympics will be on sale on a first-come, first-serve basis when the second round of domestic sales started Tuesday. (Xinhua Photo)

BEIJING, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- The sale of the second batch of Olympic tickets has been suspended after the booking system crashed due to overwhelming demand on Tuesday, the first day tickets became available.

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2008 Olympic Games (BOCOG) said Tuesday night in a statement that they had decided to temporarily halt domestic ticket sales to improve the technical system and will announce new ticketing information on November 5.

"We underestimated the public's enthusiasm for the Games...We sincerely apologize to the public for the inconvenience," Rong Jun, head of the Olympic ticketing center, told a press conference Wednesday.

The 1.85 million tickets went on sale Tuesday on a first-come, first-serve basis through the ticketing website, a hotline and 1,000 designated branches of the Bank of China.

But demand was much higher than organizers anticipated. The ticketing website saw 8 million hits in the first hour starting 9 a.m., while the ticketing hotline received 3.8 million calls, said Rong.

"All this exceeded the processing capacity of the system," he said. "It was due to the database processing, not the bandwidth. We are working to improve the database capacity."

The ticketing database, which handles all purchases, can process 150,000 per hour but there were 200,000 in the first hour, said Rong. And only 43,000 tickets were successfully purchased before the system crashed.

Rong said they are also likely to make changes to the ticket sales policy to better accommodate demand.

A total of 7 million tickets are available for the Games, with some 75 percent reserved for domestic sale. The first 1.6 million tickets were allocated after a lottery earlier this year. The third phase - from April to August next year - will also sell tickets on a first-come, first-serve basis.