Planning for peak capacity: Lessons from the Oasis ticket sales fiasco

With 14 million people due to buy Oasis tickets over the weekend, it was always going to be a peak traffic event.

Yet the systems used by major ticket sellers appear to have not been up to the job, collapsing under the weight of millions of Oasis fans during a very inglorious morning.

We estimate that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people were hit by bugs and outages as they tried to reserve a space to see the much-anticipated reunion of the Gallagher brothers.

Huge numbers of people appear to have suffered similar technical issues when buying Oasis tickets on Saturday.

On X, large numbers of Ticketmaster customers claimed they sat through a long queue and when they finally got to the booking interface, they became stuck in a doom loop and were shown the words "confirming availability".

After spending minutes or even hours watching a wheel of death fail to update, people claimed kicked to the back of a queue and stuck behind hundreds of thousands of other hopeful fans (or bots, but more on that later).

The vendor was also slammed for its dynamic surge pricing, which causes the price of tickets to increase during moments of peak demand. This policy reportedly doubled the price of tickets as millions rushed to buy them.

Does the fact so many people reported the same problem indicate bugs in the main ticket vendor's systems? Could it show they failed to plan for peak demand so were unable to flex compute and network resources to accommodate peaks without crashing?

We can't say for definite - but we can't rule out a maybe. We have written to Live Nation, Ticketmaster's owner, for comment.

What's the story? Bots, 0utages and "confirming availability"

On X, one person claimed they heroically spent one and a half hours in the queue, starting at position 17,000. Then, when they finally gained access to ticket selection at 10:30, they got stuck at "confirming availability" for more than an hour and then sent back to the queue - at 180,000th place.

Many others reported similar tales of woe, claiming they had gotten through the queue, only to be kicked out and then sent to the back of the virtual line.

During the first few hours of Saturday morning, we saw several people tweeting about the issue every minute. A quick look back in anger through the history of X shows that large numbers of people also reported being hit by the same issue.

"The never-ending circle looping confirming availability that I’ve been stuck staring at for the last 3 hours is driving me insane," one X user roared. "Can you pleaseeeeee please sort your server out I beg."

Some Oasis fans claimed they could not access the Ticketmaster website itself and were shown Error 503 and 500 errors.

Mark Flynn, IT expert at IT support firm Computer Care, said: “The Oasis ticket fiasco is a masterclass in how not to handle high-demand online events. It's astounding that in 2024 we're still seeing such catastrophic failures in basic capacity planning and load management.

“The endless loops of ‘confirming availability’ and ‘Error 503’ messages seen by fans are clear indicators of systems buckling under pressure. From a technical standpoint, there's no excuse for this level of failure. Modern cloud infrastructure allows for rapid scaling to meet demand spikes. Load testing and capacity planning should be standard practice for any company handling high-traffic events."

Other people even claimed to have reached the end of the queue, before being wrongly identified as a bot and then sent away and made to start lining up all over again.

On LinkedIn, David Thomas, Head of Cyber Resilience at British cybersecurity firm ITHQ, wrote: "My wife, who was also trying to secure tickets, experienced the ultimate frustration when she was flagged as a bot and had her session suspended just as she was nearing the front of the queue. Despite following all the advice, she was locked out of the process entirely, a situation that highlights the flaws in... [automated ticket] systems."

So, was the sheer popularity of Noel and Liam Gallagher entirely to blame for the huge traffic?

Possibly not, suggested Antoine Vastel PhD, VP of Research at DataDome, who pointed out that touts may have used bots to gather vast amounts of tickets - clogging up the system for everyone else.

 ‘With the global online ticketing market size expected to hit $68B by 2025, there’s plenty of incentive to try and game the system with bots in order to snag tickets for high-profile, high ROI events," he said. "Whether the intention is to score tickets to resell them for a significant markup or to cause mayhem by hoarding inventory, the result is the same: frustrated fans.

"Complicating matters, one no longer needs to have technical expertise to build and deploy these bots. Thanks to Bots as a Service (BaaS) providers, you can buy a bot for as little as £37 - that allows you to reserve multiple tickets potentially bypassing household limits. Previously, on some events protected with one sale per user, we have seen bot developers claiming to have bought thousands of tickets."

We are updating this story. Please check back later for more insights or contact jasper@thestack.technology to share information or analysis.

READ MORE: Intel CEO reflects on axing 15,000 "friends" and asks: "Is that enough?"