Ticketmaster drew the ire of Eurovision Song Contest fans Tuesday morning after some hopeful buyers reported being kicked off the Ticketmaster website or receiving error messages when trying to buy tickets for this year's competition.
"Tried for over an hour to book Eurovision tickets. Attempting to join queues which wouldn’t let you join & waiting in 4 different queues to eventually be kicked out when number 1 in queue. Complete chaos and I understand why so many are frustrated," one fan tweeted.
"Ticketmaster giving me the old ‘internal server error 500’ on this fine Eurovision Ticket day, who could have possibly foretold anything going wrong?" another tweeted.
Even Sam Quek, an Olympian and television presenter who is co-hosting the livestream for Eurovision’s opening ceremony, tweeted that she could not secure tickets to the grand final.
The Eurovision Song Contest, an international singing competition, will take place at the Liverpool Arena in Liverpool, England, starting May 9. Ticketmaster sold tickets to six previews and three live broadcasts for the two semifinal rounds and the grand final Tuesday.
Tickets went on sale at 7 a.m. ET and the live broadcast for the grand final sold out in 36 minutes, according to the Eurovision Twitter account. The Ticketmaster U.K. account tweeted that the rest of the shows sold out by 8:33 a.m.
"Tickets for #Eurovision2023 have now sold out. Fans still wanting to purchase tickets should keep an eye on Ticketmaster’s fan-to-fan resale if tickets become available," the company shared.
In a statement to NBC News responding to the fan-reported glitches, a Ticketmaster spokesperson said the site did not crash, despite some reports.
"The Ticketmaster site did not crash today — rather a very small number of fans experienced issues accessing the queue," the spokesperson said. "Ticket sales were unaffected, and thousands of fans secured their seats for the Eurovision Song Contest, which is now sold out."
Throughout the morning, fans expressed outrage toward Ticketmaster on social media, a sentiment that has been repeatedly shared by fans following high-profile concert sales in recent months.
Fans also reported seeing Eurovision tickets on resale sites being sold for higher prices shortly after the Ticketmaster sale began.
Fans said they faced similar issues during the presale for Taylor Swift's upcoming Eras tour, during which Ticketmaster was temporarily taken offline.
Ticketmaster has been under intense scrutiny in recent months, with legislators questioning whether its practices have hurt ticket buyers.
In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to examine Ticketmaster’s outsize role in the ticketing industry.
