Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour crashed Ticketmaster due to heavy traffic

Kaitlyn Bennett

Senior Kaitlyn Bennett finally got tickets for Eras Tour after 7 hours in the queue.

Swifties everywhere trying to score tickets to Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” had to battle in the trenches of Ticketmaster Tuesday. According to Ticketmaster’s Twitter, the site saw a “historically unprecedented” amount of fans visiting the site.

“Honestly, I’m traumatized,” said Megan Mueller, junior in microbiology. “It was an emotional rollercoaster, and I got home from classes just emotionally and physically exhausted.”

After waiting in the queue for seven hours, Mueller was finally able to snag tickets.

The queue was open for fans with a presale verified fan code, which was sent out Monday night to select fans who signed up. The sign-up for the presale took place Nov. 9.

The queue opened at 10 a.m., and Ticketmaster was facing issues within minutes. There was a “temporary pause” for over an hour as many verification codes were not working. They claimed 14 million fans joined the queue at the same time, and ticket sales had already reached the hundreds of thousands.

Nick Serck, a senior in chemistry, anxiously waited to see if he would be lucky enough to get tickets to her June 8 show at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri. Serck never obtained concert tickets before and was unsure of what to expect.

After missing class to stay near his laptop, Serck finally left the queue and got in to select seats. Before securing any tickets, the site crashed, and his screen went blank. Panicked, Serck refreshed the page and landed back in the queue.

“It was so extremely chaotic and stressful,” Serck said. “I knew that it would not go great; I knew the Ticketmaster thing would be a little clunky, but I did not expect it to be this stressful.”

Eventually, Serck was able to get the tickets while staying within his budget. However, Seth Larson, a senior in chemistry, was unable to do the same after spending six hours in the queue.

“By the time we got in, there were no regular tickets left,” Larson said. “It was just VIP, which was way more than we wanted to spend.”

The VIP tickets were on sale from $199 to $899, where Larson and his friends found themselves spending over $700 after fees. VIP tickets include lower bowl seats, early entrance and exclusive merchandise.

“It was just so, so horrible and very disorganized as well,” Larson said. “They kept saying there was an unprecedented demand, but they knew how many presale codes went out. It was just very frustrating overall.”

Some tickets for the show in Minneapolis are currently exceeding $4,000 on resale sites. This experience is not something Larson had ever gone through for concert tickets.

“I probably would not do this [for anyone else] just because she is such a big deal, and I really love her music,” Larson said. “She’s an international sensation; this is once in a lifetime. So, I’m going to go through all of that.”

The general sale on Ticketmaster was scheduled for Friday, but Ticketmaster released a statement Thursday via Twitter stating it would be canceled. This is due to “extraordinarily high demands and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”