The Swift Hunger Games officially begins on November 15th - the pre-sale for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. The singer's first tour in five years kicks off on March 17, but before jamming to songs from all 10 of her studio albums, the Swifties have to face their worst fear: Ticketmaster. Fans who were lucky enough to receive Ticketmaster's TaylorSwiftTix pre-sale verification fan code logged in to purchase tickets at 10 a.m. in their local time zone, only to be greeted with pages of reports of constant outages, website crashes and hours-long queues to get tickets. The failure of the pre-sale led the company to cancel a full pre-sale planned for November 18. Apparently, Twitter wasn't thrilled, and neither was Swift.
Swift addressed the debacle on her Instagram Story on Nov. 18, explaining that "I really have a hard time trusting an outside entity like Ticketmaster" to serve her fans and that it was "unbearable" to watch. to the point where the system fails without any solution. "There are many reasons why people are having a hard time getting tickets, and I'm trying to figure out how to improve the situation," she wrote. "I'm not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked multiple times if they could handle the demand and we're sure they can. It's really amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets but it pisses me off that A lot of them felt like they had to go through several bear attacks to get their tickets."
Swift concluded her note by hinting that more tour dates may be added in the future. "For those of you who didn't get tickets, all I can say is I hope there are more opportunities for us to come together and sing these songs," she said. "Thank you for participating. You have no idea what that means."
Just hours after the pre-sale began, Ticketmaster announced that they were experiencing "historically unprecedented demand for tickets," with "millions of people" logging in to try to purchase tickets. To accommodate foot traffic, Ticketmaster is delaying pre-sales for West Coast shows by five hours and pushing pre-sales for CapitalOne cardholders to the next day, November 16, as those with verified fan codes already face up to Hours of virtual queuing. After the CapitalOne pre-sale ended, Ticketmaster announced that it was canceling the full pre-sale scheduled for November 18 due to "extremely high demands on the ticketing system and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand." The site also wrote a full blog outlining the unexpected setbacks they encountered during the pre-sale.
Many fans who didn't pass on the pre-sale weren't thrilled with Ticketmaster's decision. Luckily for some fans, the first day of pre-sale was a huge success. But regardless of their success, they've created some of the best memes and tweets on Twitter, with many comparing their ticket-buying experience to Swift's midnight bonus track "The Great War."
Some fans have declared war on Ticketmaster after dealing with long virtual queues and constant crashes.
Other fans took "Shake It Off's" advice and simply laughed at the fear of buying tickets with hilarious jokes and memes.
While some fans were able to celebrate their victory on Twitter, others simply started praying for better luck in future pre-sales.
However, when Ticketmaster finally canceled general pre-sales, one thing became clear to Swifties: they had messed with the wrong fan base.
Ticketmaster has not yet indicated how they will sell remaining tickets, if at all. Therefore, it seems that the "war" has no end in sight.
