Swift Pre-Sale: Here's What Went Wrong

A frenzied fanbase hoping to score seats to the upcoming "Eras" tour from pop supernova Taylor Swift left Ticketmaster in shambles this week. The world's largest ticketing company, Ticketmaster cited "unpreceded traffic" during a pre-sale that forced many to wait in line for hours while the site outright crashed for others and and malfunctioned during the purchasing process for some, according to The Tennessean.

Verified pre-sale

To qualify for Tuesday's pre-sale, fans enrolled in Ticketmaster's "Verified Fan" program. About three million would-be ticket-buyers registered, according to a blog posted Thursday on Ticketmaster's website. Late Monday, the company issued codes to 1.5 million fans, but vastly underestimated how many ticket-buying hopefuls — and third-party scalping bots — may bum-rush the site Tuesday.

"Historically, around 40% of invited fans actually show up and buy tickets, and most purchase an average of [three] tickets," the Ticketmaster blog said. If applying a 40% precedent to Tuesday's pre-sale (despite Swift doubling her tour dates prior to on-sale and social media overflowing Monday evening with posts from those who scored the Willy Wonka-esque "golden ticket" code), Ticketmaster likely expected about 600,000 ticket-buyers to visit the site Tuesday, Billboard reported.

Virtual waiting rooms exploded with a cocktail of bots, verified fans and uninvited shoppers, causing the site to crash. Some never made it into the line, others entered a virtual purgatory and a few lost tickets during the checkout process.

About 3.5 billion ticket requests hit the site, Ticketmaster said — four times previous record traffic. The broker delayed a pre-sale for Capital One cardholders from Tuesday to Wednesday, but again the site bent under the weight of demand - and bots - looking for tickets.

"Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention – or uninvited volume," Ticketmaster said. The blog later added:  "... 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.