stuartasmith85

I really don't think it's this. I think, at some point, it will just have occurred to someone who knows a bit about website hosting to check if they could access Glasto tickets through the IP addresses on which the regular Seetickets site was being hosted during a sale, and (probably to their surprise) it worked.

Incidentally, while I totally get that there are cost of living issues here, this is how some sporting events do it. Lords ticket ballot, you have to put your card details in, and it just gets instantly charged if you're successful - and if the money's not there, you don't get the ticket - not sure many people are putting in for that on a total whim.

As @incidentsays, my understanding is that this isn't quite right, and that what some people did yesterday was amend their HOSTS to point to the URL to the servers that were doing normal Seetickets business, not one of those five, but for whatever reason, that still worked. Pointing it to one of the Glasto servers wouldn't have had the same result, because those servers are still busy. I don't think 13.87.94.169 was a ticketing server, I assume that is the IP address of the load balancer. I also assume (but have no real idea) that if you amended HOSTS to point to one of the actual servers being used, you might have problems with not having cookies or similar that you would have picked up going via the load balancer.

Suspect this is going to be a real thing. I'm guessing that the majority of people who were sent WhatsApps about this followed the instructions without really knowing what they were being told to do, and how/why it might work - meaning they'd be very susceptible to being given a bogus link.

This seems like the key part to me - no-one was really hacking anything, the IP addresses in question were easily publicly available - presumably, at some point, it just occurred to someone to see if the other servers worked, and they did. Glastonbury fans fuming as people appear to work out hack to buy more tickets (ladbible.com) Suspect they will be under pressure to close this out now, though.

If I’m understanding rightly, two different situations. In 2013, going back to Neil’s old post, there was an issue where the DNS was configured incorrectly, so a server that was meant to be used was not being - that was then fixed live during that sale. Here, it sounds like someone worked out that you could still access the Glasto sale pages via an entirely different server, that you wouldn’t have got to at any point this morning just going via the normal link.

I suppose the other interesting question is what changed about See’s setup to allow that to work this year (assuming it hasn’t worked in previous years)?

If this is right, how did people discover the IP address of the server in the first place? Or would that have come from someone getting the IP from a non-Glasto Seetickets transaction this morning?

I’m not so sure about this. The last of my devices to lose the holding page (waaaay after sold out) was my work mobile, on 4G, which I’d just left to refresh on the 20 second countdown. My theory was that, for plenty of time after officially sold out, the servers are still extremely overloaded with people like me hopefully hanging on. As devices gradually get through, after sell out they get to the Event not found page - whereas if they’d got through earlier, they’d have seen the reg entry page.

I think this is the big one - there's presumably been a steady trickle of people realising something's gone wrong this week contacting Seetickets (this happened to one of my friends, who swears down he re-confirmed, obviously recognises he should have checked sooner, but I think Seetickets were trying to look into it), but I would guess far more people who may be affected wouldn't realise until they, or someone else in their group, tried to book tickets tonight and on Sunday. At that point, when groups of 6 get denied and then miss out on tickets because one person's registration was incorrectly deleted, and people start shouting about it on social media, you can see the concern at Glasto's end that this was going to be a real nightmare. Obviously, not great to delay so last minute, but suspect the storm of that will die down much quicker than the alternative.

Just going from some anecdotal evidence, it looks like some people who did all the requested steps to confirm their registrations still got them deleted. Obviously, said people had loads of time to check before Monday, so I'm not sure Glasto had to do this - but I can see that, if more than a handful of people's registrations were genuinely deleted in error, and they've only really realised that this week, it made sense to do something.

Yep, was a great show. Impressive lighting rig (possibly borrowed from Broadwick, looked very Printworks!) and a great performance. Left out some big hitters, but I think he's trying to do a different show every night, so that's presumably done with that in mind. Considering how enthusiastic the Monday night crowd was, can only imagine how much of party it will be on Friday!

The whole thing sounds like a really unfortunate situation. The insightful comments above about how it unfolded, and the link to the previous shows, is really interesting - as soon as the set started, and it became clear just how intricate and theatrical it was, I figured there'd be a big problem at the end - it had clearly been choreographed extensively, and I suspect they just weren't able, on the fly, to cut things out and have it still work correctly. In the context of everything we saw on stage, I can totally believe that there was a set-up for Bartender that required her hair to be done in a very specific way. Obviously, would have been ideal for the audience if Lana was the sort of artist who could just roll with it and adapt, but it doesn't surprise me that she isn't. She's been criticised (rightly, from my own experience) before for being underwhelming live, and the hour that she did play completely surpassed all my expectations because of how much more effort had clearly gone into it. But the problem with that, presumably, was that she and her crew needed it all to happen in a very specific way, and unfortunately, that didn't quite work out. Glastonbury were totally within their rights to enforce the curfew (chaos would soon ensue if it became apparent that any headliner of any stage can just blast through the curfew without issue, and Lana presumably had upwards of 30 minutes still to go...), but I also think it's probably not quite fair to totally dismiss her lateness as just her being a diva. In hindsight, it was obviously the wrong call to just not come out and start, but in the pressure of the moment, I can see how how what seems like an easy decision to us is a much harder for one for an artist who obviously isn't the most comfortable on that kind of stage. You might say she shouldn't accept that kind of booking, and I get that, but in comparison to her 2016 performances (I saw her at Sziget), it seemed to me like she and her team really had tried to make it a substantially better show.

Cut To The Feeling is always amazing live!

Apologies if some if this has already been said, but I think the thing that's particular egregious about Verified Fan in its current form is that, presumably in order to try to prevent server overload, etc., even if you have jumped through the hoops to be registered as a Verified Fan, you still don't necessarily get the opportunity to buy tickets - Ticketmaster randomly select a certain number of people to receive codes to even try for tickets. If you don't get that code, you have no chance of buying a ticket. The absolute worst part of this sale is that the Q&A for the tour specifically said: Will there be a way to purchase tickets other than the TaylorSwiftTix Presale powered by Verified Fan? Yes. The General Public On-Sale will be Friday, November 18 at 10AM local venue time. so by actually selling all the tickets in the Verified Fan presale (whether deliberately or otherwise), that turned out to be wrong, and there really was nothing you could do to guarantee being able to even participate in the ticket sale. Thinking about the highs and lows of the Glastonbury sale, at least you always feel like you have a shot. In this system, many people didn't get to even try, and I can understand why that would feel very, very frustrating. However, presumably, Taylor's team signed off on the number of people to issue access codes to, and the number of tickets to allow to be sold during the Verified Fan presale...in which case, it's arguably not Ticketmaster's fault. If, of course, those weren't actually agreed with Taylor's team, and were either unilateral Ticketmaster decisions or, much worse in the case of the ticket allocation, system errors, then that's quite different...