Ticketmaster is canceling the upcoming public sale of Taylor Swift tickets following 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 postpone presale for shows in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Santa Clara and Seattle until later in the day. The Capital One pre-sale, which was supposed to go live on Tuesday, was postponed for an entire day.
Swift hasn’t toured since 2018 and the planned Lover Fest tour has been canceled due to the pandemic, so fans who want to see Swift perform some of her newer albums live have been waiting for a while.
Ticketmaster elaborated on this in a blog post what happened to the presale on Tuesday. More than 3.5 million people signed up as Verified Fans, “the largest sign-up” in Ticketmaster’s history, and some 1.5 million people were eventually invited to buy tickets during presale. But Ticketmaster says there was a “stunning” number 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 on the site experienced problems” – it’s unclear exactly which company counts as an “interaction”. (Ticketmaster regularly crashed for me on Tuesdays, and I didn’t even try to buy a ticket.)
Ticketmaster says it sold more than 2 million tickets for Swift’s concerts as of Nov. 15, and 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 did not elaborate on whether or when public ticket sales might take place in the future, and the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Update Nov. 17, 4:49 PM ET: Added a chart from Ticketmaster.