A MOCK auction held on Sunday to test a new online system for selling car license plates “didn’t achieve the expected result” due to a massive overload of data, the Shanghai government said yesterday.

The simulation involved 69,452 people bidding for 5,000 imaginary plates in a test of a new website-based system that is scheduled to go live later this month.

The event started at 7:30pm and all went well for the first 44 minutes. But at 8:14pm, a massive data flow crashed the system, said its operator Shanghai Commodity International Auction Co.