Ticketek Back Online After Major Outage, Presales Scrapped

Ticketek is back online after a major outage on the ticketing giant’s platform Monday (November 18) that left its Australian and New Zealand websites down, frustrating fans and creating ripples across the live music ecosystem. 

Once the site was restored, Ticketek explained the disruption was a precautionary measure in response to “system monitoring indicating a heightened threat level.”

Fans of Twenty One Pilots, gearing up for the band’s Melbourne show on Tuesday (November 19), were particularly worried about accessing their tickets, as were those awaiting pre-sales for acts like Kasabian.

Ticketek wishes to thank its Customers and Partners for their patience while our systems were temporarily offline. Our systems were back online earlier this morning and we apologise for any inconvenience.

We took this action as a precautionary measure in response to system…

— Ticketek Australia (@Ticketek_AU) November 19, 2024

Visitors to the site were met with error messages and a notice saying the downtime was due to “maintenance.” “We apologise that the update is taking longer than anticipated,” read the message. “Users may experience temporary disruptions. Our team is working hard to complete the update, please check back again later.”

The outage stretched into Tuesday morning, with the site finally coming back online after 11am.

During the downtime, Ticketek stayed quiet on social media, leaving users in the dark about what was happening.

A social post apologised for the inconvenience and told ticket holders to reach out via their help desk with any questions.

“We took this action as a precautionary measure in response to system monitoring indicating a heightened threat level,” Ticketek said in their post. 

Despite the site’s return, frustration lingered, with many punters still unable to log in or access their tickets.

The outage caused a ripple effect across the industry.

Frontier Touring switched ticketing agencies for Tuesday’s pre-sale for Jack White’s Melbourne and Sydney shows this December. Those tickets will now be sold through TicketSearch and AXS, which launched in Australia and New Zealand last year.

Sales for Alexisonfire and Ado have been delayed until the end of the week, and Róisín Murphy’s pre-sale was cancelled altogether.

Meanwhile, Ticketek is promoting big shows like Metallica, The Kid LAROI, Laneway Festival, Ryan Adams, and Katy Perry’s 2025 stadium tour.

UPDATE 💋 Due to ongoing Ticketek issues, the Frontier Member presale for Róisín Murphy’s Syd show unfortunately will no longer be proceeding.

Syd tickets on sale tomorrow, 12noon AEDT. Melb + Bris tickets on sale tomorrow, 11am local time.

🎫 https://t.co/bsxYl2cUJA pic.twitter.com/QwcJrnYfEe

— Frontier Touring (@frontiertouring) November 18, 2024

Ticketek’s operations in the United Kingdom, Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia remained operational during the outage, Billboard reports.