Anyone looking to buy a ticket to Taylor Swift’s new tour may be out of luck.
Ticketmaster said Thursday that “due to extremely high demands on its ticketing systems and insufficient ticket inventory to meet that demand,” tomorrow’s public ticket sales for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.
The sudden cancellation comes after Ticketmaster said Thursday that more than 2 million tickets were sold Tuesday for her upcoming tour — the most ever for an artist in one day. It almost caused her website to crash.
In a blog post Thursday, Ticketmaster explained that a “record number of fans” wanted to buy tickets to Swift’s Eras Tour, which kicks off next year. This caused a massive slowdown on its platform and sparked outrage among its millions of fans who were unable to purchase tickets.
Ticketmaster basically said its “Verified Fans” system, a mechanism aimed at weeding out bots that give out presale codes to private individuals, couldn’t keep up with strong demand. About 3.5 million people signed up to the program to buy Swift tickets, the “largest sign-up in history.” That unprecedented demand, combined with an “amazing number of bot attacks, as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes,” led to “unprecedented traffic” to its website, Ticketmaster said, and essentially broke it.
“Never before has a Verified Fan on sale attracted so much attention – or unsolicited volume,” Ticketmaster said in the blog post. “This disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of the Verified Fan platform.”
On Tuesday morning, Ticketmaster told CNN Business that the site was “not down” and that “people are actively buying tickets.” He added that “there has been historically unprecedented demand with millions of views” for tickets to Swift’s tour.
The debacle not only angered Swift’s fans, but also angered politicians. Sen. Amy Klobuchar slammed Ticketmaster in an open letter to its CEO, saying she has “serious concerns” about the company’s operations.
