Ticketmaster's Eras presale: 3.5M fans, 2M tickets, then the public sale was canceled

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour presale on 15 November 2022 was the biggest test Ticketmaster had ever faced: more than 3.5 million fans registered as Verified Fans — the largest registration in the company's history — and more than 2 million tickets sold in one day, a record for a single artist. By the end of the presales, Swift said 2.4 million people had got tickets.

The site could not carry the demand. Fans waited in queues for hours, up to eight, while pages crashed and sent them back to the end of the line; Ticketmaster said bot attacks and fans without codes drove 3.5 billion system requests, four times the previous peak, and that about 15% of site interactions experienced issues. On 17 November the company canceled the public sale, citing extraordinary demand and insufficient remaining inventory, and resale listings hit $20,000–$22,000 within days.

The blowback outlasted the tour. Tennessee's attorney general opened an antitrust probe, fans filed a class action in California, and in January 2023 the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing at which Ticketmaster's dominance — more than 70% of ticketing — was the subject. In May 2024 the Justice Department and 30 states sued Live Nation over an alleged illegal monopoly, seeking a breakup, with the Swift presale cited in the complaint.