Now the London organising committee (LOCOG) have taken the unprecedented step of offering to buy back all unwanted Olympics and Paralympics over the next two weeks and then to put them on sale again from April.

It means London 2012 will assume the financial responsibility if any of those tickets remains unsold.

Organisers will not confirm how the tickets will be re-sold until closer to the time.

LOCOG commercial director Chris Townsend said: “We are sorry for any inconvenience caused by the suspension of our ticketing resale platform. We made a commitment to our customers to give them a safe, secure and legal way of selling Olympic and Paralympic tickets which they are no longer able to use. We are delivering on that commitment, and will buy any tickets that customers are no longer able to use at face value until 3rd February.

“Every ticket we purchase from the public will be offered back to the public from April. We believe this system – purchasing the tickets back from customers now, and offering them again from April, will result in a better customer experience for everyone.

“This is the right solution, at the right time given we also have test event tickets on sale currently.”

The re-sale site failed to cope with demand on the first day it was launched and caused frustration to tens of thousands of people who tried to buy tickets that appeared to be available but had not been removed from the system.

Organisers asked their agents Ticketmaster to come up with a solution but the new system will see re-sold tickets made available at the same time as the one million ’contingency’ tickets that will go on sale from April, rather than being sold to the public now – and risking another failure of the system and public relations disaster.

A London 2012 spokeswoman said: “The platform is there to help people resell tickets in a safe, secure and legal way, recognising that we asked people to commit a long time before the Games and that circumstances may change.”

The tickets sales system has been the biggest headache for London 2012.

The initial sales window saw 1.2million, two-thirds of applicants, left empty-handed and consumers’ group Which? criticised organisers for debiting people’s bank accounts before telling them which tickets they had been successful in buying.

There was also frustration for the public in the second sales window when many consumers assumed they had purchased tickets for events only to find out two days later those tickets had not actually been available.

Earlier this month, London 2012 admitted that 10,000 too many tickets had been sold for synchronised swimming due to a clerical error and 3,000 people had been offered tickets for alternative events.