The Georgia Theatre in Athens, GA, recently experienced a technical glitch that temporarily prevented people from buying tickets to separate shows by the String Cheese Incident and Brantley Gilbert, and ticketing company TicketBiscuit is apologizing to fans for the mix up.
According to TicketBiscuit CEO Jeff Gale, orders for tickets for the two acts briefly overwhelmed the system during onsales last Friday, August 26, due to a “hidden bug in [TicketBiscuit’s] Calendar View of events,” which resulted in the company’s servers bogging down “as more and more fans logged on.”
“Once we identified the problem, we acted quickly to fix it by disabling the Calendar View of events,” Gale said in a statement to TicketNews. “For the fix to take, we had to restart our ticketing engine, which unfortunately caused some fans to see error messages, and forced others to restart their orders.”
Gale was quick to add that technical snafu was caused by TicketBiscuit and not the Georgia Theatre, and also said that speculation that ticket brokers caused the problem — by trying to buy up large blocks of tickets — was untrue. TicketBiscuit staff monitored the whole sequence of events and reported that very few customers ordered as more than four tickets to the shows. The limit was 10 tickets per customer.
“For what it’s worth, my sincere apologies go out to the fans who weren’t able to get tickets,” Gale continued in the statement. “I know how frustrating it is to look forward to a show, wake up early to buy tickets, and then get shut out by some BS-looking ticketing company. Although it didn’t look that way… we’re better than that. We are committed to improving the ticket buying experience and will work hard to restore our reputation with fans. But bottom line: [the] epic fail was TicketBiscuit’s – not the Theatre’s. I take full responsibility for it and promise to do everything in my power to prevent it from happening again.”
Georgia Theatre owner Wil Greene said despite the situation being rectified relatively quickly, fans did not hold back in voicing their anger.
“It’s one of those situations where you try to make it easy to buy tickets online and print them out at home, but when it breaks people sure get upset,” Greene told the Athens Banner-Herald.
