Ticketmaster is giving a long-overdue apology to the Swifties!

In case you haven’t been following The Eras Tour tickets debacle, here is a quick rundown. Fans have been enraged over the past week after Tuesday’s Verified Fan presale saw millions of people waiting in hours-long online queues and experiencing technical difficulties, error messages, the website crashing, and more. Following the ordeal, Ticketmaster ended up canceling the general ticket sale due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory” to meet those said demands.

Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s owner, tried to blame Taylor Swift and fans for the mess, but the 32-year-old singer wasn’t having it! She penned on Instagram Stories Friday that the whole situation “really pisses me off,” saying:

“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”

Related: Drake Shades Taylor With Petty Emoji Commentary!

Now, the ticketing service company released a formal statement on Friday night to apologize to Taylor and her Swifties for the ticketing disaster, tweeting:

“We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans – especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets. We feel we owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened.”

We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans – especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets. We feel we owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened: https://t.co/1Gn4kRIvq8

— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) November 19, 2022

Along with the message, Ticketmaster shared a link to a blog post about what led to its website crashing and hours-long wait times for fans who were able to get a code for the presale. In the lengthy message, the company reiterated the main issue is that they didn’t anticipate the demand for tickets. Considering Tay is one of the biggest artists in the world, we would think that they would assume a ton of people would have wanted to try to get their hands on tickets! Just saying! They explained that “around 40% of invited fans actually show up and buy tickets, and most purchase an average of 3 tickets” normally. For The Eras Tour, Ticketmaster said:

“Around 1.5 million people were sent codes to join the onsale for all 52 show dates, including the 47 sold by Ticketmaster. The remaining 2 million Verified Fans were placed on a waiting list on the small chance that tickets might still be available after those who received codes had shopped.”

But on the day of the presale, fans, bots, and others who didn’t have codes “drove unprecedented traffic on our site.” Even though Ticketmaster says it handles some of the biggest sporting events in the world and massive tours, Taylor’s tour “disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of our Verified Fan platform.” They even provided a chart to show how huge the presale traffic was in comparison “to every other day on our site this year.” To combat the high traffic, Ticketmaster “slowed down some sales and pushed back others to stabilize the systems,” adding:

“The trade off was longer wait times in queue for some fans. Overall, we estimate about 15% of interactions across the site experienced issues, and that’s 15% too many, including passcode validation errors that caused fans to lose tickets they had carted.”

As for the tickets being sold on secondary markets? They said “less than 5% of the tickets for the tour have been sold or posted for resale on the secondary market,” noting that “onsales that don’t use Verified Fan typically see 20-30% of inventory end up on the secondary markets.” Hmm… Ticketmaster concluded the blog by promising:

“The biggest venues and artists turn to us because we have the leading ticketing technology in the world – that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and clearly for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour onsale it wasn’t. But we’re always working to improve the ticket buying experience. Especially for high demand onsales, which continue to test new limits. We’re working to shore up our tech for the new bar that has been set by demand for the Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour. Once we get through that, if there are any next steps, updates will be shared accordingly.”

We’ll believe it once we see it. Thoughts on the situation, Perezcious readers? Are you buying this apology? Sound OFF in the comments below! You can read Ticketmaster’s message HERE.

[Image via WENN]