London Marathon ballot site down as runners rush to find out whether they got a place

Organisers urge users to stop clicking through to broken website

The man, from South East England, collapsed between mile 23 and 24 (Yui Mok/PA) (PA Wire)

The London Marathon’s website has broken, as runners rushed to find out the results of its ballot.

Users were unable to find out whether they would be running the event in 2023, amid a major outage on the website.

The London Marathon ballot opened in early October, and runners were required to sign up for a chance at getting a place. The event is always vastly oversubscribed, with almost half a million people entering for just 17,000 places in 2020.

Organisers began emailing those who had entered about their result on 24 October. But the notification arrived in an email that asked users to click through onto their website to find out the result.

When they did, however, they were greeted by an array of messages that informed them that the website was broken and would be unable to show their result.

Visiting the organisers’ website was also impossible, with the homepage and other pages also refusing to load.

Organisers had sent out the emails in waves, staggering them throughout the day, presumably in order to limit the demand on the website. But that appeared not to have worked.

The issues were present throughout the results on Monday, and on Twitter organisers asked users to allow the website to clear and advised that pages would eventually load. But they asked people to stop clicking on links until those problems had abated.

“We are aware of an issue that means some of you can’t currently access your ballot results,” organisers posted through the official Twitter account. We’re working on a fix and will update you as soon as we can.

“For the moment please wait until we have provided an update before trying to click through to your results.”

Earlier, they had joked about the fact that the results of the ballot would be coming through at the same time the Conservatives chose their new leader, deciding the new prime minister.

The London Marathon will be held on 23 April, 2023. It will be the first time it has been held in April since the coronavirus pandemic, which pushed the event into October.