Taylor Swift is speaking out after tickets for her upcoming The Eras tour caused Ticketmaster to crash.
The recent debacle left millions of fans outraged — and lawmakers demanding answers about the company’s operations after many fans were unable to purchase tickets for the highly-anticipated tour on Ticketmaster.
“It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” Swift wrote on Instagram on Friday. ”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,” she said in the message, which doesn’t name Ticketmaster but alludes to the ticketing failure.
“There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets, and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward,” she continued. “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.”
She added that it was “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,” she wrote.
On Tuesday, sales for the Grammy-winner’s new tour began, but the high demand shut down the ticketing site, leaving fans who could not pocket a ticket utterly furious. Some even reported the site sending them back to the beginning of a virtual queue with thousands ahead of them after attempting to purchase seats.
Slews of customers also complained and reported that the platform was not loading and didn’t grant them access to tickets, even if they had a pre-sale code for verified fans.
On Thursday, Ticketmaster tweeted that “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand” were to blame and “tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been canceled.”
The entertainment company said on Thursday more than 3.5 million people pre-registered for Swift’s Verified Fan sale, the largest in its history, per the New York Times.
Fourteen million people attempted to buy her pre-sale tickets on Tuesday, the CEO of Ticketmaster’s largest shareholder claimed.
“It’s a function of Taylor Swift. The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans,” Greg Maffei, CEO of Liberty Media, said during an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Steet.” “We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”
After the cancellation, ticket prices soared on re-sale sites, with seats at various venues running as high as more than $20,000 as of Friday.
Addressing the incident, the singer wrote on Instagram: “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.”
She added, “Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.”
Swift recently added 17 dates to the U.S. tour, which launches in March in Arizona and ends in August in Los Angeles. The tour will include 52 concerts.