Taylor Swift crashes Ticketmaster before on-sale even begins

Update November 18 2:00 p.m. The Department of Justice has opened an investigation of Ticketmaster because of what happened with Taylor Swift. Swift also released a statement to her fans about what happened.

1:27 p.m. update: Ticketmaster has delayed the presale for west coast shows by five hours as they are unable to handle the volume of users on their site. The queue is still paused for those in line for shows in the central time zone. The Capital One presale, which was initially supposed to begin on Tuesday, has been moved to Wednesday afternoon.

The Ticketmaster site was not prepared for the volume of Taylor Swift fans logging on for Tuesday’s verified fan presale. As the lucky fans who were selected for the presale attempted to join the waiting room queue for tickets, Ticketmaster is reportedly crashing on many people’s devices. On Twitter, people reported having issues logging onto the site due to the amount of traffic Tuesday morning.

The presale was supposed to open at 10 a.m. local time depending on the venue that fans received a code for, with a waiting room opening up 30 minutes before the sale begins. The queue for the central time zone ticket purchasing window was paused with no further explanation for nearly three hours on Tuesday.

Ticketmaster recommends using the link that verified fans received via text to log in rather than using the Ticketmaster home page.

Others can’t use the browser due to repeated 500 error or 503 error messages from the back end, but are fine using the app. Some people are being told they can’t add their presale code when they already have one.

Swift’s Eras Tour has 52 concerts planned throughout 2023. She added 17 dates to the original announcement after it became clear just how high the demand was for the tour.

This might end up being one of the darkest days in SwiftieLand if this doesn’t get resolved, and Ticketmaster might have to deal with the wrath of federal regulators as well as one of the largest and most vociferous fan bases on earth unless this gets fixed.

Here’s our own personal experience trying to get seats for the show in Tampa.

30 seconds later ...

The on-sale moves by time zone, and at 11 a.m. ET all shows in the Central Time Zone will be on sale, which are the following:

Houston: April 21-23
Nashville: May 5-7
Chicago: June 2-4
Minneapolis: June 23-24
Kansas City: July 7-8

We still haven’t heard anything from Ticketmaster about this disaster yet, but you would think a statement of some kind will be coming forth soon. President Biden just a few weeks ago announced his administration was investigating fees on concert tickets via the Federal Trade Commission, which he called “junk fees.”