Ticketmaster Cancels Sale of Taylor Swift General Ticket Sale, Fans Are Outraged
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Upon suffering a website meltdown, Ticketmaster abruptly canceled their general ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. The incident sparked outrage among fans.
Ticketmaster Halts Taylor Swift Ticket Sale After Site Glitches
On Thursday, Ticketmaster cited “insufficient remaining ticket inventory” as the reason for their general ticket sale cancellation. A staggering demand from fans unfortunately prompted their system to a massive slowdown, crashing some parts of the company’s website.
The bad news comes after Ticketmaster reported that over two million tickets were already sold after the presale for Swift’s upcoming tour. While this is surely an accomplishment for the artist, Swift sold the most tickets ever within a single day, ticketless fans are still pretty upset.
Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan system, a mechanism targeted to eliminate bots that gives presale codes to individuals, failed to cater extreme public demand. Apparently, roughly 3.5 million people registered for this program just to get Swift’s tour tickets.
“Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention – or uninvited volume,” Ticketmaster wrote. “This disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of our Verified Fan platform.”
The situation was even worsened when fans who didn’t have invite codes went to the website. Consequently, this has driven an “unprecedented traffic” among buyers.
Fans Express Disappointment Over Ticket Sale Chaos
As fans look for alternative methods to get tickets to The Eras Tour, #TicketmasterIsOverParty began trending on Twitter. Some deliberately cast doubt on the Verified Fan system, while others demand to fix the “unacceptable” ticket sale cancellation.
Amid website complications, Greg Maffei, chief executive of Liberty Media, large shareholder in Ticketmaster’s parent company, tried to address the issue.
“We are working hard on this,” he said. “And, again, building capacity for peak demand is something we attempt to do but this exceeded every expectation.”
This is not the first time that Taylor Swift led fans to almost crashing a website. When she released her latest album, Midnights, on October, Spotify was overwhelmed with fans who wish to stream her music. Midnights quickly became the most-streamed album in 24 hours on Spotify, with 184.6 million streams as per Guinness World Records. Recently, she broke another record for being the first artist to steal all the top 10 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
