The downside to mobile ticketing reared its ugly head on Thursday evening, as fans at several sporting events faced huge lines and confusion due to a massive Tickemaster outage.
Fans at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, Atlanta’s Mercedez Benz Stadium, Sun Devil Stadium at Arizona State University, and the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York were all affected, according to reports.
“Ticketmaster is presently experiencing a significant outage impacting access to fan accounts at sporting events,” the ticketing giant said in a statement to Pollstar. “We are working diligently to resolve this issue and will provide updates as they become available. If you are a Ticketmaster ticket holder experiencing problems at an event please go to the box office.”
We are presently experiencing a significant outage impacting access to fan accounts at sporting events. We are working to resolve the issue.
— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) September 1, 2017
Twitter user Christopher Seward – a digital journalist in Atlanta, per his bio, tweeted the headline photo of fans stuck outside of the brand new stadium in Georgia, where the Falcons were playing a preseason contest against the Denver Broncos. “Falcons ticket app isn’t working,” he said. “So thousands of people who have tickets via the app having trouble. CONFUSION!”
This is far from the first time fans being forced to use digital-only entry systems were faced with outages that led to huge lines. This spring, a similar Ticketmaster outage at a U2 show in British Columbia led the company to issue rebates and free tickets to fans who were stuck waiting in line so long they missed the opening act, Mumford and Sons.
While Ticketmaster defends its push to limit the issuance of paper or print-at-home tickets as one of fan convenience and ease of access, as well as to combat fraud, the reality is that outages such as this are always a possibility. ESPN reporter Darren Rovell, sharing Seward’s photo summed it up:
Teams say they are going mobile to prevent fraud. What happened tonight with Ticketmaster outage affected 50X more than will ever be frauded
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) September 1, 2017
Update: Ticketmaster tweeted the all-clear at close to midnight east coast time:
The issue from earlier has been resolved.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused at tonight’s events.— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) September 1, 2017
