Taylor Swift has broken her silence after Ticketmaster cancelled the general sale of tickets in the US leg of her The Eras tour.
The site cited "insufficient ticket inventory" to meet "extraordinarily high demands" on Thursday, mere hours before the tickets were due to be released on the site.
Taking to her Instagram stories on Friday, the frustrated singer, 32, said she was finding it "excruciating that mistakes have happened" and apologised to the millions of fans.
She wrote: "Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans. We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house.
"I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do.
"It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.
"There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.
"It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really p****s me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.
"And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs. Thank for you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means."
General ticket sales were planned to open on Friday morning following the verified fan presale which opened on Tuesday for Swift’s Eras Tour, before the company cancelled the public sale altogether.
On Thursday, Ticketmaster tweeted: "Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift The Eras Tour has been cancelled."
The ticket company had previously asked fans on Twitter to be patient as "millions" tried to buy tickets in the presale, causing "historically unprecedented demand".
It comes after the singer triumphed at the MTV Europe Music Awards (EMAs) over the weekend, winning four of the top gongs, including two for All Too Well.
Across her six nominations, Taylor took home best video and best longform video award for the song, as well as best artist and best pop at the ceremony in Dusseldorf, Germany.
The songstress ensured she thanked her fans – known as Swifties – for every award, saying at one stage: “You’re the reason that anything has ever happened to me.”
The American leg of her tour will kick off on March 18 in Glendale, Arizona, with the singer joined by a number of popular artists during the tour, including bands Paramore and Haim, as well as solo artists Phoebe Bridgers and Gracie Abrams.
Swift’s latest album Midnights claimed the biggest first week of album sales since Adele’s 30 was released last November and took the title of the most streamed album of the year in its opening week with 72.5 million streams across the seven days.
