The "Anti-Hero" singer broke all kinds of records with the release of her latest album, Midnights. So you can imagine that ticket sales for her Eras tour, her first since 2018, would be big. We just didn't predict it would go so awry during the pre-sale when an unprecedented number of fans with pre-sale codes flooded the site on Tuesday and bought up the tickets. As a result, the public ticket sales, which had been set for Friday, has been canceled with Ticketmaster, which is handling the sales, citing "insufficient remaining ticket inventory."

So what happened? The pop superstar partnered with Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program, which allowed her superfans — aka the Swifties — to pre-register earlier in the month to receive a special code that allowed for early ticket sales on Nov. 15 — three days before they go on sale to the general public. The verification process also aims to identify real humans versus bots to weed out bulk buying and reselling.

However, there was a glitch — or, for the most die-hard — a catastrophe. Fans logged in on Tuesday and were hit with error messages or trapped in the queue for two hours. Other fans who planned to get tickets were sent to a wait list. The sale of West Coast tickets was also delayed for three hours to ease traffic to the site. Angry fans captured screenshots of the glitches and posted them to social media slamming Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster was trending, with even U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighing in.

The ticket company, owned by Live Nation, posted that there was a "historically unprecedented demand" with millions showing up to buy tickets. The business later posted an entire explainer unpacking what went wrong. It was known the sale was going to be a big deal after 3.5 million people pre-registered, the largest Verified Fan registration in history. That led to Swift's tour team, managed by AEG and The Messina Touring Group, to add more shows, doubling the dates and the tickets. Approximately 1.5 million people were invited to participate in the presale with the other 2 million on a waiting list. Those numbers were decided because Ticketmaster historically sees 40% of invited fans, with the specials codes, actually showing up and buying tickets, and most purchase 3 tickets on average.

When the pre-sale tickets became available on Tuesday, those with the codes went to the site and so did fans who didn't have a code. On top of that, there was a "staggering number of bot attacks," with those factors resulting in unprecedented traffic to the site, according to Ticketmaster. There were 3.5 billion — yes, billion! — system requests, which was four times more than the company ever experienced. In total, 2 million tickets were sold that day — the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day. The company claims that every ticket was sold to a buyer with the special code.