Ticketmaster yanked its explanation for the Taylor Swift ticket debacle

Where did the explanation go? | Photo by Sven Hoogerhuis / BSR Agency / Getty Images

Ticketmaster has taken down its explanation for why buying a ticket to Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour was an absolute disaster. The explanation, titled “The Taylor Swift Onsale Explained,” was live in two places on Ticketmaster’s website on Thursday and is now gone from both. But because the internet never forgets, you can still read it thanks to Google’s cache, and in case that fails, we’ve embedded it at the bottom of this article.

In its post, Ticketmaster said that despite spending out 1.5 million invites to Verified Fans for Tuesday’s presale and putting 2 million fans on a waiting list, it saw “3.5 billion total system requests,” which the company said was four times its previous peak. Ticketmaster also shared a somewhat vague chart to demonstrate just how much traffic came in, but it gets the point across well enough.

Image: Ticketmaster
That’s quite a spike.

Fans were furious on Tuesday as they had to put up with crashes and paused queues while attempting to buy tickets to the show, and Ticketmaster canceled the planned public ticket sale for Friday. Swift finally put out a statement about the situation on Friday, and she didn’t have kind words for Ticketmaster: “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.”

Ticketmaster didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.