Detonate festival overshadowed by queuing disaster

Festival goers were forced to queue for up to three hours, due to last minute, untested, administrative change on the system.

Detonate festival, held in Nottingham, made a last minute decision to go for contactless payment on the customers wristbands. But it backfired when their WiFi system went down during the middle of the day.

This caused outrage with punters as they were forced to queue outside the event for up to three hours because the stewards were not allowing anyone in until the system got working.

People took to Facebook to make complaints to the company. One attendant said the festival was “extremely disorganised”.

Detonate responded to these comments publicly on the festival group page, apologising for the problems.

They said: “We’d like to apologise for the excessively long queues getting into Detonate Festival yesterday. A number of issues arose simultaneously which meant it took far too long to get people in.

“Although we had been advised otherwise, the wristbands required the Internet to activate them. When the Internet went down they couldn’t be activated.This happened at the busiest time and so caused the queues to back up.

“As a small independent company of just four people, we’ve worked very hard for the last 12 months to put on the festival, and we have to use third party providers for certain aspects.”

They stated that they felt massively let down by their technology providers, and that they appreciated the crowds patience during these issues.