“It was a real art world event,” VIP Art Fair co-founder Jane Cohan said trying to put a bright face on the fair’s first-day delays. “It was hard to get into!”

The VIP Art Fair’s publicity campaign collided with a software feature on the morning of January 23rd causing outages and delays for many of the eager viewers. Despite strained goodwill and frayed tempers, fair organizers were able to isolate the problem in the chat system and shut it down. The compromised allowed the fair to resume traffic and register 3.3 million views from 130 countries by 6pm EST on Monday.

Organizers claim that traffic has been steadily increasing over the three days despite the delays and they anticipate it building until the fair’s end on January 30th. As with the first day, peak traffic time is 8am in the morning as European usage converges with American traffic.

Many frustrated fair-goers wondered how the site could launch without having been tested for traffic overload. But organizers were sufficiently supported with servers, back up and balancing. The problems lay with the way the chat system interacted with the site at scale slowing the whole site to a crawl.

But since chat was only meant to be used to initiated contact between buyers and gallerists, the fair should continue according to plan without much hindrance.

There’s even talk that some galleries have already made sales. But we’ll wait until we hear from the galleries to confirm that.

To report a sale: VIP Gallery Sales