Olympic ticket sale slammed by Assembly member

Mr Biggs said: "I think it is reprehensible that LOCOG has been unable to design a ticket selling system that only offers ticket for sale that actually exist, rather than allow people to try and buy tickets that have long since sold out.

"It appears LOCOG have tried to win the gold medal for the worst ticket selling operation in the whole of human history.

"In addition to the ticket issue the site was taken down at 11pm on Wednesday evening for 12 hours of maintenance, preventing Londoners from purchasing tickets."

Tickets went on sale on Wednesday morning with 500,000 made available for sports including volleyball, taekwondo and boxing.

Pre-sale LOCOG had warned there would be queues of over 30 minutes at peak times and that the maintenance closure was planned to create print files to print tickets sold so far.

However, Mr Biggs said: "Who in their right mind would schedule updates to a ticketing website in the middle of a 24 hour sales window. This beggars belief"

"I shall be writing to Seb Coe to find out why this has happened and for him to apologise to all those Londoners who are paying for the Olympics via their council tax but have been prevented for getting a ticket."

In response, a spokesman for LOCOG said: "The nature of a first come, first served system is that customers are queuing for a diminishing number of tickets - unfortunately this did mean some people got to the front of the queue and the tickets they were after were no longer available.

"The scheduled system update was to enable us to convert yesterday's sales into print files so tickets can be printed and ticketholders will receive them in good time for the Games.

"Mr Biggs is incorrect to say this is a 24 hour sale, remaining tickets are available right up until Games time."