‘Cooked’: Fans fume as Ticketek website goes down

Customers and ticketholders have been left fuming at an extended outage on Australian ticketing agency Ticketek’s website.

UPDATED 12:45PM: Ticketek has now released a public statement about the outage, explaining why they were “temporarily offline.”

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

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

Earlier, customers and ticketholders were left fuming at an extended outage on Australian ticketing agency Ticketek’s website this week.

Anyone trying to access Ticketek’s website was met with a message saying the site is “undergoing maintenance” that is “taking longer than anticipated.”
The outage is believed to have started in the early hours of Monday morning, and extended until at least 9:30am on Tuesday. As at 10:10am today, the website appears to be back up and running, but issues persist: Frontier Touring this morning announced that a planned presale for singer Roisin Murphy’s upcoming Australian tour had been pulled due to Ticketek’s “ongoing issues.”

Touring companies scramble over Ticketek's "ongoing issues."

Ticketek issued no public statement on social media during the outage, which led to increased frustration from punters wanting to use the website to buy tickets, or to access and download tickets they’d already purchased to music and sporting events.

Those trying to access the Ticketek website have been met with this message.

“Why is @Ticketek_AU not posting that their website and app are down? How the hell are people supposed to access their tickets?!” one person asked on X.

“yikes is anyone else stressing about Ticketek being down? I can’t access my tickets,” another tweeted.

“ticketek is under maintenance and I cant access my tickets am I cooked,” another complained.

A spokesperson from Frontier Touring today revealed in a statement to news.com.au that several planned ticket presales have been moved on account of the outage.

Ticketek customers complain about it.

Punters with tickets to see the Drop Kick Murphys (pictured) in Melbourne last night are among those who’ve been affected. Picture: AAP

“Frontier Touring became aware the Ticketek website went into ‘maintenance’ in the early hours of yesterday for security reasons (Mon 18 Nov). As a result, we postponed yesterday’s planned presale for Sydney and Melbourne shows by US rocker Jack White. As of this morning the Ticketek site is still not able to sell tickets so the rescheduled Jack White presale has been moved to alternative ticketing agencies AXS (Melb) and TicketSearch (Syd). We are also cancelling today’s presale for Roisin Murphy, moving the onsale for Alexisonfire and presales for Ado. Fans should check frontiertouring.com and our socials for ongoing updates,” the spokesperson said.

Those who directly tweeted Ticketek asking for help – including punters heading to Monday night’s show by the band Drop Kick Murphys at Melbourne’s Forum Theatre – received a reply from Ticketek asking them to “privately message” them.

“We don’t have quite enough information from this post. Please privately message your Ticketek contact details so we can assist you further,” the response read.

News.com.au has this morning contacted Ticketek for comment.

The mysterious outage comes months after the ticketing giant reported that customers’ names, emails and dates of birth had been accessed in a data breach.