Ticketmaster's website crashed again, disrupting ticket sales for the Eurovision Song Contest 2023

A view of the a phone screen displaying a Eurovision Song Contest tickets page and a page on the Eurovision website displayed on a laptop screen, informing those wishing to buy tickets that all shows are sold out.

Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images

• Ticketmaster crashed once again, this time during ticket sales for the Eurovision Song Contest 2023.
• People say they got error messages and that the website glitched when they tried to access it.
• Ticketmaster was criticized in November for messing up sales to Taylor Swift's "The Eras Tour."

Ticketmaster disappointed fans again when its website glitched on Tuesday, disrupting the sale of tickets to the Eurovision Song Contest 2023.

Some people trying to secure tickets were unable to access the website and greeted with "500 - Internal Server Error" messages, Bloomberg reported. Others were thrown out of the virtual queue and received a message saying their session had expired "due to inactivity," per Bloomberg.

Tickets went on sale at 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Eurovision tweeted at 7:36 a.m. that all its tickets for the annual music competition's grand finals were sold out. And at 8:32 a.m., it announced that tickets to all the Eurovision shows were sold out.

Disappointed Eurovision fans made themselves heard on Twitter after they failed to get tickets.

Samantha Quek, a BBC television presenter, tweeted that she's presenting at the opening ceremony — but even she could not get tickets. 

—Sam Quek (@SamanthaQuek) March 7, 2023

In December, Ticketmaster faced criticism after an "unprecedented" number of people were sold fake tickets to a Bad Bunny concert in Mexico City.

The company also came under fire in November after its system was overwhelmed during ticket sales for Taylor Swift's "The Eras Tour."

Joe Berchtold, the president and CFO of Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster's parent company, was called to testify before a Senate committee in January over the Taylor Swift ticket sales debacle.

During his testimony to the Senate on January 24, Berchtold apologized to Swift and her fans, saying that "bot traffic" disrupted the ticket sales. 

This year's Eurovision Song Contest, which is organized by the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union, will be held from May 9 to 13 at Liverpool's 11,000-seat Liverpool Arena, per Eurovision's website.

Tickets for the event were priced from $31 to $305 for the semi-final shows, and between $84 to $400 for the grand final, per Ticketmaster's website.

Representatives for Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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