Look what you made Ticketmaster do.
The ticketing service has released a statement addressing the bungled sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour saying, “we want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans – especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets.”
For those who haven’t been following the chaos, here’s a brief rundown. Ticketmaster canceled the general sale of tickets to Swift’s first tour since 2018 this past Thursday after rescheduling the Capital One cardholder sale. On top of that, the service was unprepared to deal with the volume of fans trying to purchase tickets through the Verified Fan presale this past Monday. The Ticketmaster website crashed ahead of the Verified Fan presale and fans endured hours-long queues with some getting an error message when they finally reached the front of the line.
“We estimate about 15% of interactions across the site experienced issues, and that’s 15% too many, including passcode validation errors that caused fans to lose tickets they had carted,” the press release reads.
Ticketmaster blamed “unprecedented traffic” on the site due to bots and fans without presale codes for the issues with the site during the Verified Fan presale.
In their lengthy statement, Ticketmaster runs through the numbers that informed their approach to the Eras Tour. It reports that 3.5 million people registered for the Verified Fan presale — the largest registration in its history. Around 1.5 million fans received presale codes and 2 million tickets were sold during the Verified Fan presale breaking their record for the most tickets sold in a day.
Yesterday, Swift broke her silence on the debacle in a statement on her Instagram story. The Midnights singer wrote, “we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they would.”
Hopefully, the story of Swift and Ticketmaster might be ending soon.
