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Ticketmaster is canceling the upcoming public sale of Taylor Swift tickets after the presale debacle earlier this week. Ticketmaster said it canceled the sale “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand” in a tweet Thursday afternoon.
The fallout was so bad that Ticketmaster had to delay the presale for shows in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Santa Clara, and Seattle to later in the day. The Capital One presale, which had been set to go live on Tuesday, was pushed an entire day.
Swift hasn’t been on tour since 2018, and the planned Lover Fest tour was canceled due to the pandemic, so fans who have been wanting to see Swift perform some of her newer albums live have been waiting for some time.
In a blog post, Ticketmaster elaborated further on what happened with the presale on Tuesday. More than 3.5 million people registered as a Verified Fan, “the largest registration” in Ticketmaster’s history, and around 1.5 were ultimately invited to be able to buy a ticket during the presale. But Ticketmaster says there were a “staggering” amount of bot attacks and many fans visiting who didn’t have invite codes. That resulted in 3.5 “total system requests,” which was four times Ticketmaster’s previous peak. Ticketmaster vaguely says that “about 15% of interactions across the site experienced issues” — it’s unclear exactly the company is counting as an “interaction.” (Ticketmaster regularly crashed for me on Tuesday, and I wasn’t even trying to buy a ticket.)
Ticketmaster says it sold more than 2 million tickets on November 15th to Swift’s concerts, and that every buyer was one with a Verified Fan code. “While it’s impossible for everyone to get tickets to these shows, we know we can do more to improve the experience and that’s what we’re focused on,” Ticketmaster wrote. Ticketmaster hasn’t elaborated on if or when the public sale of tickets might happen in the future, and the company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Update November 17th, 4:08PM ET: Added information from a Ticketmaster blog post.
wazup.