If you were expecting to get Taylor Swift concert tickets when they go on sale to the general public, you may be disappointed.
During presale activities on Tuesday and Wednesday, fans flooded the Ticketmaster website. The general public was supposed to be able to purchase tickets on Friday, but the corporation declared that this is no longer the case.
“Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled,” Ticketmaster posted Thursday afternoon on social media.
Ticketmaster said that more than 2 million tickets for her next tour were sold on Tuesday, the most ever sold for an artist in a single day. It nearly brought down its website.
Ticketmaster noted in a blog post Thursday that a “record number of fans” sought to get tickets to Swift’s Eras Tour, which begins next year. This caused a significant slowdown on its platform and created fury among her millions of followers who were unable to purchase tickets.
Some Massachusetts fans who attempted to purchase tickets for three Gillette Stadium performances on social media reported being thrown out of the queue or being detained in the digital line for hours.
Swift will perform at Foxboro’s Gillette Stadium on May 19, 20, and 21.
Ticketmaster simply stated that their “Verified Fans” system, a technique designed to exclude bots that distribute presale credentials to individuals, was unable to keep up with the high demand.
Roughly 3.5 million people signed up for the program to buy Swift tickets, its “largest registration in history.” While more than half of those registered were put on a waiting list, the unprecedented demand, combined with a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes” drove “unprecedented traffic” to its site, Ticketmaster said, and, essentially, broke it.
“Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention — or uninvited volume,” Ticketmaster said in the blog post. “This disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of our Verified Fan platform.”
Ticketmaster said that the website was “not down” and that “people are actively purchasing tickets.” It went on to say that “there has been historically enormous demand with millions coming up” to get Swift’s tour tickets.
Swift’s followers were outraged, but lawmakers were also enraged by the situation. In an open letter to Ticketmaster’s CEO, Senator Amy Klobuchar expressed “severe concerns” about the company’s activities.