It’s 2016 and technology has achieved mind blowing things, but apparently Ultra Music Festival still figured out how to sell early bird tickets. Remember back in 2014 the festival famously began its early bird sale with tickets disappearing in seconds because most people could not get the site to load? Well in the wake of that screw up Ultra released a 2nd batch of early birds. Now it appears that Ultra 2017 is encountering the same types of issues. It turns out the very feature Ultra fans have relied on to quickly get their tickets before they sell out is the culprit. After difficulties in 2013 and 2014, fans realized they needed to have their information typed in as quickly as possible so they saved it in a browser auto-fill feature.
Then Ultra began requiring people to pre-register for Early Birds, which would give them a unique login code. Ticketfreak, the vendor, began using waiting queues to keep the server load down. It seemed that everywhere would finally run smoothly. This year many early bird purchasers felt lucky enough to make it through and purchase tickets that totaled only $320 after all fees, only to find that when they clicked submit nothing happened. In fact, refreshing or starting over didn’t work either and after 10 minutes the purchasers had their tickets released and were kicked back out into the queue only to find that early birds were gone. That screwup costs purchasers a minimum of $60 if they ended up with Tier 2 tickets, but even when the buyers went back in at the higher price the same problems persisted.
To make things even worse, if buyers tried to use another browser their code was no longer valid and they were only able to pay full price. As it turns out the culprit here was browser Autofill features. Anybody who let their browser fill in their information got stuck, while those who manually typed in every line got through. In addition, it appears that additional early birds were made available because this writer was able to get back in and purchase Tier 1 Early Birds at around 1:40pm after previous messages said they were sold out. Don’t give up guys and remember, Ultra may do a second Early Bird sale again in the fall.