If you see tickets available, they may be the last few remaining. At that time there may also be other customers who have just reached the front of the queue trying to purchase the exact same tickets. Whichever customer places the tickets into their basket first, will have them reserved while they complete the checkout process.

The queue helps here, as rather than 10,000s of customers all trying to get those same tickets at once, there’s likely to only be 100 or so at any one time.

We could eliminate this completely by letting 1 customer through to the event page at a time, and only if tickets were available, but your queueing time would be many hours, and we expect you have better things to be getting on with.

I received a server error or saw a maintenance notice

We try extremely hard to ensure customers can purchase tickets, and our website uptime is usually 99.99% or higher. We have one of the best availability records in the industry. After all, if our website is down, we’re not making any money so it’s in everyone’s interest to stay available!

Sometimes the demand for an event may take everyone by surprise, despite careful planning, or a server may die unexpectedly, a payment processor may be experiencing issues, etc. We apologise if this does happen, and will always be working very hard behind the scenes to rectify the issue (our developers are drip fed caffeine during these busy times!). Ultimately computers, and humans, aren’t perfect, but we try our hardest to be!