Users left frustrated as Burning Man’s in-house ticketing suffers meltdown

Burning Man festival recently suffered a meltdown on its online ticketing platform, leaving frustrated users unable to buy tickets.

The festival’s main sale, offering around 23,000 tickets and 10,000 vehicle passes, had numerous technical issues. Many received ‘Unable to Proceed’ and ‘Nothing here’ error messages while trying to buy tickets.

After refreshing the page, many users were then told they were ‘too early’ to purchase, while some were forced to click an ‘invisible button’ to proceed to the purchase page of the website.

Burning Man handles its ticketing in-house, and does not make use of an external ticketing provider.

Following the meltdown, users on Twitter wondered if they were able to handle the huge demand the festival faces every year.

At this point, I think the issue is that even Burning Man doesn’t know if they have tickets left. #InfrastructureFail

— Paul Wagner (@pmwagner) April 10, 2019

Pictured: Burning Man 2014, photo by Andrew Wyatt