DENVER -- Colorado's sales of World Series tickets were shut down Monday after fans and ticket brokers overwhelmed the computer system.

Rocktober quickly gave way to Mocktober for thousands of frustrated fans who were left staring at error pages on their computer screens.

Rockies spokesman Jay Alves apologized to fans in a news conference just after 6 p.m. Monday.

"We're very sorry to our fans. Continue to be patient with us. We will have some (new information) hopefully, sometime this evening," Alves said.

The status is exactly the same as it was when ticket sales were suspended Alves said.

"We continue to have conference calls with our partners as we continue to work through this tonight," Alves said. "It was a very, very large response."

Alves said he would provide an update to the media before 10 pm. Stay with TheDenverChannel.com for more information and live video of the news conference.

Team officials had said earlier their computers were ready to handle the expected crush of traffic because they are hosted on MLB.com servers. However, they didn't mention earlier that ticket requests would actually be funneled off to servers hosted by evenue.net in California.

Ticket sales were suspended about 2 ½ hours after online sales began.

"We're shutting the system down, we're going to suspend it," said Jay Alves, a Rockies spokesman who was booed by fans who had gathered at Coors Field. "We're as frustrated as our fans are."

The spokesman made his comments as dozens of fans chanted and continued booing throughout his brief news conference. They had gathered at the ticket office after they had no luck buying tickets online and had hoped that the Rockies would change their mind and sell tickets at Coors Field.

Alves said several hundred tickets were sold before the system was shut down and the company actually handling the ticket sales was overwhelmed by Rockies fans -- unlike anything they had seen in previous online sales.

"Our ticket vendor, Paciolan and Major League Baseball, were overwhelmed -- 8.5 million hits in an hour-and-a-half is a phenomenal total. Paciolan services more than 700 college and professional level teams and they are amazed and overwhelmed by what's happened here this morning," he said.

That figure probably did not surprise many fans who had predicted the computer system would melt from the crush of fans wanting tickets.

According to the Rockies Web site, Paciolan experienced a system wide outage that impacted all of its North American customers.

Paciolan CEO Dave Butler said he did not yet know whether demand for Rockies tickets caused the crash. Paciolan owns evenue.net.

"This is not the Rockies' fault in anyway whatsoever," Butler said. "We are working hard to address it."

Some irate fans pointed out that Paciolan has dozens of job openings posted on Monster.com, but it was not clear if this helped contribute to the problem.

Alves said more than 20,000 tickets or "virtually the entire allotment of tickets" were still available and will go on sale when the computer system is brought back online "later today."

"We are looking at getting the online system up and running sometime later, I can't give you a time or date," Alves said.

The owner of Fark.com, a popular news aggregating Web site, was one of those trying in vain to get tickets for his father who lives in Colorado.

"These idiots always have these consultants that tell them, 'Sure, the server can handle the traffic,'" said Drew Curtis. "In reality, that only works over the course of a day. If a zillion people hit the damn thing all at once, it goes boom. Think CNN on 9/11."

Coors Field seats more than 50,000, but about 30,000 spots per game are allotted to season-ticket holders, the two teams and Major League Baseball.

Season-ticket holders got a chance to buy their tickets last weekend and experienced no problems.

The online-only sales for regular fans began at 10 a.m. Monday, and the Rockies site was re-directing fans to evenue.net to purchase tickets. A check of a number of computers showed all users either getting very slow loading pages or getting "unable to display Web site" errors when trying to buy tickets.

Here's a sampling of the e-mail TheDenverChannel received within the first 30 minutes of tickets going online:

"All I'm getting is a white screen." -- Elizabeth Burnside
"I was rerouted and page could not be displayed." -- Heather Fisher
"The server never loaded the page because it was too busy. I thought they were supposed to be able to handle this kind of computer traffic." -- Beth Hartzell
"I am also having problems with their website! It's not loading the page. This is sad for the true fans." -- Lauren Hybinette
"I'm frusted that I didn't have a fair chance to purchase tickets at all!" -- Adam Hiatt
"It stinks! How disappointing for so many fans, my family included." -- Michelle Carr
"Biggest debacle in Denver Sports history." -- Gary Pageau

Jesse H. James wrote that he thinks he got tickets but never got a confirmation page:

"God what a pain, here is my ticket order, I was confirmed four tickets and have been trying to check out and purchase for over 1/2-hour. I either get error messages or am re-directed to other sites which require other log-in and registration. I am very disappointed with how this was all handled, I still don't know if my tickets are being purchased as I wait for Web pages to load. I doubt my tickets are still available at this point. I am very upset."

Another fan said he was able to get in and order tickets for $1,042, but never made it to the checkout page before he got an error.

Click here to discuss your experience with other Rockies fans.

Denver Public Library branches that usually open at 10 a.m. were to open 15 minutes early so fans without Internet access could buy tickets. None of the fans we talked to at the library were able to get in either.

Club president Keli McGregor said earlier that the Rockies consulted with Major League Baseball before making the change to online-only ticket selling.

Before the online sale, Alves insisted the club's computers were ready to go and said the staff was prepared for any crashes.

The Colorado Rockies Web site is hosted on servers of MLB.com and a spokesman for MLB said earlier "traffic is not an issue" and the servers have handled World Series ticket sales before with no problem.

That statement didn't sit well with fans who couldn't get into the Web site Monday morning.

"MLB says it has handled World Series Tickets online before but evidently evenue.net hasn't -- that's the site that is handling the ticket sales and giving the error messages," wrote Pam Saxton. "My guess is that they severely underestimated their own capacity."

By comparison, the Boston Red Sox distributed their home game tickets by lottery several weeks ago, before they knew for sure they were heading to the World Series. The remainder of the Boston tickets were sold by phone.

The switch to online sales was made in part due to the team's experience with the Wild Card tiebreaker game and the first two rounds of the playoffs, when online sales reached 500 tickets per minute at one point, Alves said earlier.

"Especially with the weather being as unpredictable as it is in Colorado, this will ensure we can avoid the lines outside the ballpark," MLB spokesman Mike Teevan said.

Without going into detail, Alves said measures were in place to try to thwart scalpers looking to scoop up dozens of tickets.

"We are comfortable and confident in what we have to allow the most fans to get the most tickets we can possibly distribute," he said.

Super-fast computers normally used only during emergencies were to be staffed Monday so state employees could buy Rockies World Series tickets online.

Until word of the plan got out, that is.

"I need volunteers to help push buttons in attempting access,"David Holm, recently the acting director of the state Division of Emergency Management, said in an e-mail. "You will need to use break time, lunch time or leave time to do this and the only real perk I can offer right now is that if someone does not pay for their tickets within three days, you will get first crack at them."

The computers in the Emergency Operations Center are normally activated during tornadoes, floods, snowstorms and fires. And some are wary about letting people use them to buy World Series tickets.

"Taxpayers did not invest in an emergency response center so that state employees could use it for their own personal advantage and buy baseball tickets," said Chantelle Taylor, a spokeswoman for Colorado Ethics Watch.

Department of Local Affairs Director Susan Kirkpatrick initially approved the plan, saying she did so to prevent her employees from leaving work to buy tickets. She said her technology department said it would not compromise security.

Peter Bishop, 32, had planned to start work late Monday so he could be in line at Coors Field at 7:30 a.m. for the lottery. Along with friends and family members, he wants eight seats, ideally for Game 3.

"We're certainly not being picky. Any ticket is a blessing as opposed to no tickets," said Bishop, of Denver.

Bishop also posted four ads on Craigslist seeking to buy from season ticket holders. As of last week, he hadn't heard anything. Bishop had mixed feelings about sales being totally online.

"If 250,000 people are online trying to get tickets, I can't imagine the Rockies' Web server can handle that sort of load," he said.

One season ticket holder who identified himself only as Jim was offering two Game 4 tickets on Craigslist for $1,500 each Wednesday. He said he will be at Coors Field for the World Series but couldn't use all his tickets.

The ticket reseller StubHub already has sold more than 700 tickets for Game 3 at an average price of $718, spokesman Sean Pate said. The cheapest sale was an upper right field reserved seat that sold for $348; the most expensive sale was $3,000 for an infield box seat, Pate said.

The average price on StubHub was $1,556 for a seat in Boston, Pate said.

The Rockies organization warned fans that tickets sold through other vendors may not be legitimate.

Tickets originally were to be sold at Coors Field and Rockies' Dugout Stores in the Denver area, as well as online. The team announced last week that all sales would be online because that would be more fair.