Ticketmaster has issued a formal apology to Taylor Swift and her fans following a ticketing catastrophe this week that left millions outraged — and lawmakers demanding answers about the company’s problematic operations.
The debacle happened after many fans could not purchase tickets for the Grammy winner’s highly-anticipated 2023 “Eras” tour earlier this week, leading Ticketmaster to cancel the general sales.
“We want to apologize to Taylor, and all of her fans — especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets,” Ticketmaster tweeted on Friday. “We feel we owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened.”
Ticketmaster also provided a link to an extended explanation on its website about why the pop star’s throngs of fans, known as Swifties, couldn’t buy tickets.
During the presale earlier this week, the site crashed shortly after launching as over 14 million fans, and slews of bots flooded the site, causing service disruptions.
Sales for Swift’s new tour began on Tuesday, but the high demand rapidly locked customers out of the sale, leaving fans who could not pocket a ticket utterly furious. Some even reported the site sending them back to the beginning of a virtual queue with thousands ahead of them after attempting to purchase seats.
Numerous customers also complained and reported that the platform was not loading and didn’t grant them access to tickets, even if they had a pre-sale code for verified fans.
The “Bad Blood” singer addressed the “excruciating” mishap, apologizing to her fans on Friday.
“It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” Swift wrote in an Instagram story. ”It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” she said in the message, which didn’t name Ticketmaster but alluded to the ticketing failure.
“There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets, and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward,” she continued. “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them multiple times if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured they could.”
She added that it was “truly amazing” that 2.4 million people got tickets.
“But it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” she wrote.
On Thursday, Ticketmaster tweeted that “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand” were to blame and “tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been canceled.”
The ticket sales and distribution company announced earlier that day that more than 3.5 million people pre-registered for Swift’s Verified Fan sale, the largest in its history, per The New York Times.
After the cancellation, ticket prices soared on re-sale sites, with seats at various venues running as high as more than $20,000 as of Friday.
Addressing the incident, the singer wrote on Instagram: “And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs.”
She added, “Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.”
Swift recently added 17 dates to the U.S. tour, which launches in March in Arizona and ends in August in Los Angeles. The tour will include 52 concerts.
