FANS clamouring for tickets at one of the world's biggest dance music festivals were left disappointed today as the website was overloaded and crashed.

People trying to pre-register to get tickets for the Tomorrowland festival, which takes place in Belgium over two weekends in July, were faced with an error message as hundreds of thousands of people tried to make sure they were first in line.

As the process opened at noon Central European Time today, excited fans were at first greeted by 502 bad gateway messages, then later the pre-registration process was closed altogether.

A message on the festival's website said: "Our hosting partner is currently having issues, preregistration will open at a later time today. Please try again later.

"You can preregister until the 15th of February 12PM CET."

Several people took to Twitter to vent their frustration.

@Beatbouncers wrote: "1st artists for #Tomorrowland are confirmed: Bad Gateway, Error 502 & Error 503! #TML14", while ‏@MissThally wrote: "The requested madness could not be found" I just laughed so hard."

The organisers tweeted the following explanation to its 750,000 Twitter followers: "The hosting company is facing some technical issues. Pre-registration possible soon. No worries, you will have 3 weeks time to pre-register."

The festival is "liked" by more than 5 million people on Facebook and the organisers offered an incentive to the first 10 people who registered for tickets.

Go to the Tomorrowland website for more info.