New York (CNN Business) — Anyone looking to buy a ticket to Taylor Swift’s new tour may be in luck.
Ticketmaster said Thursday that “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.”
The sudden cancellation comes after Ticketmaster said on Thursday that more than 2 million tickets were sold on Tuesday for his upcoming tour, the most ever for an artist in a single day, causing his website to crash.
In a post Thursday, Ticketmaster explained that a “record number of fans” wanted to purchase tickets for Swift’s “The Eras Tour,” which begins next year. That caused a massive slowdown on his platform and sparked outrage among his millions of fans who couldn’t buy tickets.
Ticketmaster basically said that its “Verified Followers” system, a mechanism meant to kill bots that give people pre-sale codes, couldn’t keep up with the intense demand. Approximately 3.5 million people signed up for the show to buy Swift tickets, the “largest record for her in history.” That unprecedented demand, combined with a “staggering number of bot attacks, as well as fans not having invite codes,” generated “unprecedented traffic” to his site, Ticketmaster said, and, essentially, broke it.
“Never before has a verified supporter sale garnered so much attention, or uninvited volume,” Ticketmaster said in the blog post. “This disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of our Verified Follower platform.”
On Tuesday morning, Ticketmaster told CNN Business that the website was “not down” and that “people are actively buying tickets.” He added that “there has been a historically unprecedented demand with millions coming forward” to buy tickets for Swift’s tour.
The debacle not only sparked outrage among Swift fans, but also drew the ire of politicians. Senator Amy Klobuchar criticized Ticketmaster in an open letter to its CEO, saying she has “serious concerns” about the company’s operations.
