On Friday, Nov 25 Ticketmaster halted public ticket sales of Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour after a chaotic rollout of presale tickets that left fans waiting for hours on the ticketing site, with many walking away frustrated and empty-handed.

When 11-time grammy winner Taylor Swift announced her “Eras” tour, fans were ecstatic. This was going to be her biggest tour yet due to the fact that it will encapsulate all of her albums as well as her re-recorded versions of these songs. With all of this information, Swift, fans, and Ticketmaster all knew the demand for the tickets would be high, yet, the sale of tickets was handled so poorly that we are all left to wonder what happened.

On Tuesday presale tickets were released to the public on Ticketmaster. A mad rush ensued causing over two million tickets to be sold in one day, the most tickets ever sold for a single artist in one day. With so many people being on the site at once trying to buy tickets, it caused many glitches until the site finally crashed. This caused many fans to be unable to purchase tickets leading to disappointment and anger from the Swifties.

Ticketmaster tried to play down these issues tweeting on Thursday that only 15 percent of users experienced issues on the site. Ticketmaster later deleted that statement with no explanation.

Another reason for the site crashing would be bots or “ticket scalpers.” These are people who use an algorithm to mass-buy tickets. They take those tickets and resell them on websites such as StubHub for profit. 

This whole debacle leaves fans to place the blame on Ticketmaster. Many say that Ticketmaster unfairly dominates the ticket market and encourages the scalping of tickets in order to increase its profit margin. Fans are still left with questions regarding whether they have actually acquired tickets to the concert. We can only hope to have our questions answered within the next few days.