Ticketmaster has been forced to cancel the general on-sale of Taylor Swift tickets after more than two million tickets were snapped up during the pre-sales for the singer’s US Eras Tour.
In a statement, the Live Nation-owned ticketing platform said: “Due to extraordinary high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.”
Earlier this week, Taylor Swift fans faced lengthy waits as they attempted to purchase pre-sale tickets for her 52-date US tour. Millions of fans tried to secure tickets after signing up to Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan pre-sale, which was set up to deter bots and scalpers.
Ticket sales were already delayed for certain regions of the US to ease the pressure on Ticketmaster, and a pre-sale for Capital One credit card-holders was postponed by one day.
Ticketmaster originally posted an explanation into the chaos of the Taylor Swift sales, but this appears to have been removed.
According to the ticketing platform, two million Verified Fans were sent to a waiting list and 1.5 million were offered the chance to buy tickets when the sale started.
“Historically, working with Verified Fan invite codes has worked as we’ve been able to manage the volume coming into the site to shop for tickets,” Ticketmaster said. “However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”
Ticketmaster added: “It usually takes us about an hour to sell through a stadium show, but we slowed down some sales and pushed back others to stabilise the systems. The trade off was longer wait times in queue for some fans.”