Ticketmaster cancels public sale of Taylor Swift tour tickets

Officials with Ticketmaster announced in a statement Thursday that they were cancelling the public sale of tickets for Taylor Swift’s upcoming “The Eras Tour” after unprecedented demand for presale tickets caused the company’s website to crash Tuesday.

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In a statement obtained by CNN, Ticketmaster officials said that “due to extraordinarily 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.”

More than 2 million tickets were sold for Swift shows on Tuesday — the most ever sold for an artist on a single day, according to Ticketmaster.

The tickets were sold through the company’s Verified Fan program, in which people can register to purchase presale tickets. The program is aimed at weeding out bots and ensuring that tickets go to real people.

Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ ticket sales crashed Ticketmaster, sparks frustration for fans

Ticketmaster officials said that more than 3.5 million people preregistered to buy tickets through Swift’s Verified Fan. A majority of those — 2 million people — were put on a waiting list based on projected sale estimates that took into account previous sale numbers.

“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 officials said Thursday in a statement. “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.”

Officials said they had never before seen so much attention for a Verified Fan sale. The company estimated that “about 15% of interactions across the site experienced issues ... including passcode validation errors that caused fans to lose tickets they had carted.”

Beginning in March, Swift is scheduled to perform 54 shows as part of U.S. leg of “The Eras Tour.” The final show is scheduled to take place at Sofi Stadium in Los Angeles on Aug. 9.

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