'Bot attacks': Ticketmaster halts Taylor Swift ticket sales, sending Live Nation shares down
'Extraordinarily high demand', insufficient inventory force ticket sales cancellation
Ticketmaster canceled plans to sell tickets to the general public on Friday for singer Taylor Swift's upcoming tour, citing extraordinarily high demand and insufficient inventory.
The company said bot attacks and uninvited fans drove "unprecedented traffic" that caused website outages and long wait times during Tuesday's ticket presale.
The site was criticised for excessive wait times during the sale and Tennessee's Attorney General is now investigating those complaints. The company said on Thursday that only about 15% of interactions across its site experienced issues.
Ticketmaster's website experienced 3.5 billion system requests, four times its previous peak, during the presale. About 1.5 million people had been invited to participate, and 2 million were placed on a wait list.
The uninvited volume "disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of our Verified Fan platform," the company said in its statement.
It assured Swifties, as the singer's fans are known, that it will work to improve users' experiences going forward. A record-breaking 2 million tickets were sold for the tour, the most sold for any artist in a single day.
Shares of Live Nation Entertainment Inc., Ticketmaster's parent company, fell 3.2% on Thursday to close at $71.74.