Many Kenyan football fans have been disappointed after failing to buy tickets for the highly anticipated Kenya vs Madagascar quarter-final in the ongoing African Nations Championship (CHAN). The ticketing platform Mookh Africa has explained why this is happening – and it’s because of a serious bot attack mixed with massive traffic from real fans.
On Tuesday afternoon, Mookh Africa released an official statement saying that their online system suddenly went down when ticket sales began.
They revealed that once the tickets were made available, their servers were flooded not only by genuine fans but also by automated bots, which overloaded the system and caused a crash.
“When sales opened, our system was overwhelmed by automated bots, preventing genuine fans from securing tickets as intended,” Mookh said in the statement.
The company also assured supporters that their technical team is urgently trying to fix the issue before reopening the platform. They emphasized that their goal is to make sure real supporters get a fair chance to buy tickets, not bots.
“We know how important it is to you to have a fair chance of getting tickets, and we’ve heard your frustrations. Our team is actively working on the issue so that tickets go to fans – not bots,” their statement added.
Earlier on Tuesday morning, Mookh had announced that ticket sales would officially open at midday for the Friday match at Moi International Sports Centre, Kasarani — news that created a lot of excitement and impatience among Kenyans across the country.
Unfortunately, just minutes after noon, the website suddenly crashed. Many users took to social media platforms to complain, saying they were seeing strange error messages every time they tried to access the page. In all cases, they were unable to buy tickets.
Some users reported seeing the infamous 404 Error: Page Not Found, meaning the page they were trying to reach didn’t even exist or wasn’t loading properly.
Others said the website was simply taking too long to load, while some fans received a message saying the ticketing portal would open at a later time — creating confusion and worry.
As thousands logged in trying to secure a seat for the much-awaited match, a number of users even claimed they were completely blocked from accessing the Mookh website. One message received by blocked users stated:
“The website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution.”
This message indicated that the website’s security systems might have mistakenly identified some real users as suspicious, probably due to the high number of requests happening at the same time.
The “bots” mentioned by Mookh are automatic software programmes that are usually designed to buy tickets faster than humans.
They fill in forms and complete transactions within seconds, often beating real fans to the tickets. These bots are commonly used by scalpers who later resell the tickets at a higher price.
At the moment, Mookh Africa is working hard to restore the system and relaunch ticket sales. Fans are eagerly waiting for another chance to purchase tickets — hoping that this time, the system works smoothly and tickets go to real supporters and not automated bots.
More updates are expected from Mookh before Friday, August 22, when the big game is scheduled to take place.
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