Fans of The X Factor are up in arms after a technical glitch appears to have affected the voting system in last night’s final.
The highlight of the show was Jackie Thomas being crowned the winner of the first season of The X Factor NZ over fellow finalist Whenua Patuwai.
Fans reported votes submitted for the two finalists did not count towards the end result.
Text votes submitted while the voting lines were open were reportedly replied to after the voting had closed with a message saying the vote had been received too late.
The fans who cast these votes seem to have wasted their 99 cents.
Customers from telecommunications providers Vodafone, Telecom and 2degrees all reported problems.
Jo Tito tweeted last night “@xfactornz still trying to vote!! What’s happening”
The X Factor NZ replied: “We had a unprecidented response! We are very sorry you are having difficulties accessing the app.”
JPW commented on an earlier Stuff article: “My wife and I both voted for Whenua prior to his end of the final performance, we never recieved a confirmation text for our votes, then over 40 minutes later after Jackie had sang, we recieved text “sorry but voting lines for the X Factor NZ have closed” so all our votes didnt count even though they were done well ahead of time, we called TV3, a man said they have been getting alot of complaints and couldnt tell me why only a guess he said was something wrong with text msg going out. Fixed Factor I think, TV1 you have a story here.”
Lurker NZ commented on the same story, saying that despite a lot of votes for Jackie not counting, the end result would have been the same.
“Her Dad was on the radio this morning and said she had so many votes by 12pm yesterday, that even if they’d stop accepting votes for her then, she’d not of been caught by Whenua’s votes.”
A TV3 spokesperson said they were waiting on a full technical report from last night, and could not comment on individual cases until then.
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