Ticket sales for the Beijing Olympics again ran into problems yesterday, despite guarantees that the online system had been repaired after an earlier foul-up led to the dismissal of the ticket centre's director last year. A total of 1.38 million tickets were to be released in the third round of ticket sales that began yesterday for 16 sports, including boxing, soccer, baseball, beach volleyball and wrestling. But chat files and blog comments showed that ticket buyers were having problems completing purchases.

While people were able to log on to the website and select tickets fairly easily, they could not reach the final payment page.

A message reading, "The system is under maintenance. Please visit the page later" appeared on the screen. And the website kept directing users back to the login page, and finally showed a message apologising for not being able to process the purchase.

"It's just frustrating and a waste of time," said one person who tried numerous times to buy tickets before giving up.

Officials at the Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games had no immediate comment.

State television showed footage of people queueing at a Bank of China branch, an alternative way of buying tickets, hours before the sale actually started.

"We got up at around 5 in the morning," China Central Television quoted an elderly man as saying. Tickets for "hot" events such as basketball had already sold out, it said.

The former director of the Beijing Olympic Ticketing Centre was sacked in November after the online  system collapsed due to overwhelming demand almost immediately after the second round of sales began.

In the first three hours of the October sale, the site received 20 million hits, BOCOG had said. As a result of the system crash, only 43,000 of the 1.85 million tickets reserved for the second round were allocated.