Although I had presale AND a Capital One card... I still didn't end up with tickets to The Eras Tour. In response to all the crashing, errors, and chaos, Ticketmaster explains why everything went the way it did.
First thing's first... "Over 3.5 million fans pre-registered for Taylor’s Verified Fan program, the largest registration in Ticketmaster’s history." Only 1.5 million actually received a presale code, the rest were waitlisted.
Although only 1.5 million fans should've been going onto Ticketmaster, they explain that, "However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak."
They also explain that, "...based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows… that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years.”
Find out more on Variety.
Ticketmaster was trying to keep their site from crashing in real time by pausing queues - the first day of presale I didn't have access to the tickets until 3-and-a-half hours after onsale due to this. During Capital One presale, I was kicked when it was my turn. For another date, I got in but no tickets would add to my cart. I'm not talking "another fan beat you to these tickets". It literally erred every time - and I had so many opportunities to get floor seats for $300 per ticket. Finally, it was in a loading screen for over five minutes, ended in an error, and I guess Ticketmaster was fixing the problem while that was happening because all of the tickets were gone or went out of my budget. It's almost infuriating, especially because I see tickets that I SHOULD have had in my cart on resale sites for thousands of dollars.
HOW DO WE GET RID OF BOTS?!