Taylor Swift hits out at 'excruciating' Ticketmaster tour chaos

Taylor Swift on Friday lashed out at Ticketmaster over the botched sale of her upcoming tour, saying it was "excruciating" to learn that thousands of her fans had struggled to buy tickets.

The US pop mega-star's "The Eras Tour" was due to go on public sale Friday. But after days of glitches and long waits for those attempting to buy early pre-sale tickets, the public sale was abruptly canceled on Thursday.

"It's really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse," Swift wrote on Instagram.

Without naming Ticketmaster directly, Swift said she and her team had 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."

Ticketmaster, a dominating force in the ticketing industry, blamed "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory" for the public sale cancelation.

It cited a "staggering number of bot attacks" along with fans without pre-sale codes trying to purchase early tickets -- meaning their site experienced 3.5 billion system requests, they said, four times the company's previous peak.

It was not immediately clear whether the sale would be rescheduled, or how many unsold tickets remained. Ticketmaster did not respond to an AFP request for clarification.

Swift wrote Friday: "And to those who didn't get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs."

© 2022 AFP