FATBOY Slim fans complained of unfair queuing systems and website crashes after failing to get tickets to a beach concert he is headlining this summer.

Tickets to both dates for the On The Beach festival sold out within hours as music lovers sought to grab their place at the event.

However, many were left disappointed after facing website crashes, with some taking to social media to describe ticket-seller Skiddle as “shambolic”.

BBC South East reporter Lucinda Adam was among them, posting on Twitter that she waited for more than half an hour to buy tickets to Friday’s event, but was greeted with an error message that said “It’s all gone Pete Tong” when she clicked ‘Buy tickets’.

“[I] lost my sense of humour, and Skiddle never sent me a Thursday link as promised. Not impressed at all,” she said.

Another person claimed to have entered the waiting room an hour before the sale of tickets began at 10am yesterday, but was then “randomly put 7,600th in the queue”.

Others also took to social media to vent their frustration, with Jo Eyre explaining that the website continued to crash and was then unable to add a ticket to the basket when the page finally loaded.

"Really not a fun user experience, was pointless waiting in a queue," Jo said.

In a statement, Skiddle said: “Fatboy Slim was a very high in-demand event, so there was a very high demand for tickets.

“We set up a queue to ensure everyone had a fair chance of purchasing tickets.”

The company apologised to those who were unable to get the tickets they wanted.

DJ Norman Cook’s performance will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Big Beach Boutique concert, which saw more than 250,000 concertgoers gather on Brighton Beach.

The concert has been described as the “biggest event Sussex has ever seen”.

The musician released a promo video last week ahead of the ticket sale, which featured him reading a copy of The Argus from July 2002 with eight pages of photos from the huge performance.

Fatboy Slim, 58, has launched an appeal to find the Hawaiian shirt he wore at the gig, so it can be displayed at an anniversary exhibition.