Around 60,000 tickets for this year's Glastonbury Festival have been snapped up, within 12 hours of going on sale.

The huge demand for the 100,000 tickets for this year's event has created a jam of callers, with many finding the telephone lines constantly engaged.

But the system is "working correctly", according to sales organisers.

Festival-goers are unable to use credit cards to purchase tickets, which went on sale at 2000BST on Thursday in a bid to stamp out the problem of touts.

Tickets are also being sold on the internet, and festival organisers said that 300,000 people logged onto the site, which went live at the same time as the telephone line.

There have been reports of people struggling to buy tickets online, however.

They added that the figure did not drop for six hours after the site went live.

The 8pm start was an attempt to dissuade touts and allow people who are at school or at work to buy tickets.

Tickets have to be bought by debit card, because organisers thought touts had bought multiple tickets by credit card last year.

Every ticket will carry the name of the person who bought it. Identity checks may be carried out at the festival gates to ensure people have not bought their tickets from touts. [...]

---

Glasto tickets selling, but can you get through?

Glastonbury tickets went on sale at 8pm last night and the phone lines have been jammed ever since.

As of this 11 morning around 70,000 had been sold, but it is expected they will sell out by lunchtime.

Organiser Michael Eavis has told Radio 1 that they have had a few problems, but demand is huge and sales are going well.

Tickets are restricted to two per person and can only be bought with a debit card (not a credit card). All tickets are personalised and checks will be made on the gates to avoid ticket touts selling them on at high prices. [...]

---

[...] Glastonbury Festival organiser Emily Eavis spoke exclusively to Xfm today saying they were selling "around 100 tickets a minute" and that there were still tens of thousands of tickets left. However, the aloud website doesn't appear to be handling the ticket sales very well at all. After being down for most of the night it is now up but still seems unable to do the job it's meant to. Disgruntled would be punters are clearly frustrated as they are told that they have requested too many tickets and then getting kicked out after retrying. Emily Eavis' advice is to use the phone system (0870 830 2004) as it's more reliable, saying "I know it's frustrating when it's engaged all the time but it's still possible it really is, just keep trying. There's over 40,000 left, that's a lot of tickets and there are hundreds of operators." [...]