Taylor Swift says Ticketmaster fiasco ‘excruciating for me’

One day after Ticketmaster announced that it had canceled the public sale of tickets for Taylor Swift’s upcoming “The Eras Tour,” the singer said the ordeal has been “excruciating” to watch.

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In a statement obtained by CNN, Ticketmaster officials said Thursday that they were canceling the planned ticket sale “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” The announcement came two days after demand for tickets swamped Ticketmaster’s website, causing errors for some users and sparking frustration for fans.

“It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” Swift said in a statement posted on Instagram. “We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house. I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do.”

She said that it was “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.”

Ticketmaster officials said the company sold more than 2 million tickets for Swift shows on Tuesday — the most ever sold for an artist in a single day. The company utilized its Verified Fan program, in which users register to buy presale tickets, as a way of regulating site traffic and keeping the sales from going to bot accounts.

Still, officials said the site was swamped with traffic from bot attacks and fans who didn’t have Verified Fan invite codes.

“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,” Swift said on Friday. “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.

“It’s 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.”

For fans who were unable to get tickets, Swift said that she hopes “to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs” and thanked them for wanting to be part of the tour.

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