Ticketmaster cancels general ticket sales for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour due to 'insufficient remaining ticket inventory'
Ticketmaster has canceled Friday's general ticket sale for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, citing "insufficient" inventory.
The company had announced earlier on Thursday that Swift's upcoming tour had broken several sales records earlier in the week as well as "parts of our website" during the Verified Fan presale period. General ticket sales were originally due to open Friday morning before being axed.
"Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory due to meet that demand, tomorrow's public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled," Ticketmaster tweeted.
In its earlier announcement on Thursday, the company had responded to criticisms over its handling of the the Verified Fan presale, which opened on Tuesday, Nov. 15. Ticketmaster stated that it "knew this would be big," but said the presale ended up being bombarded with "bot attacks," which ultimately caused site outages and other technical issues for users.
"Over 3.5 million people pre-registered for Taylor's Verified Fan, which is the largest registration in history," the statement explained.
Of that number, Ticketmaster invited 1.5 million fans to take part in the Verified Fans pre-sale, but a "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."
"Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention," the statement continued. "Over 2 million tickets were sold for Taylor's shows on Nov. 15 -- the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day."
The company maintained that "every ticket was sold to a buyer with a Verified Fan code."
During the presale period, fans reported widespread outages and long wait times to purchase tickets, with some saying they waited for four hours or longer before ultimately giving up or logging off empty-handed.
As "Good Morning America" reported previously, some $60 nosebleed seats were reportedly being resold for $700, and one fan even claimed to have found a resale ticket priced at $33,750.
Ticketmaster vowed in its earlier statement on Thursday to use this as a lesson to "improve the experience."
"The biggest venues and artists turn to us because we have the leading ticketing technology in the world -- that doesn't mean it's perfect, and clearly for Taylor's on sale it wasn't," it added.
As for those upset fans who were left without tickets, Ticketmaster said the math wasn't on their side. "Based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing)… that's a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years," the company said.
This story has been updated to include Ticketmaster's announcement that it had canceled general ticket sales for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour.
