Featured News

ShowClix ‘profoundly disappointed’ in Burning Man fiasco

ShowClix has admitted it was at fault during the Burning Man ticketing technical issues earlier this month, stating it is “profoundly disappointed”.

The Pittsburgh ticketing company apologised for “frustrating people trying to purchase tickets” during the festival’s main sale, during which 23,000 tickets were made available to the public.

ShowClix is ticketing the event for the first time this year, after Burning Man’s agreement with Ticketfly and their new owners Eventbrite ended in 2018.

ShowClix’s president Brian Arnone released a blog post in an attempt to explain what had caused the ticketing sale to be shut down after complaints of technical difficulties, unexpected credit card charges and site timeouts. The blog post marked the first time the company had acknowledged its role in the meltdown for Burning Man.

He wrote: “We are profoundly disappointed that we did not perform in the way that the Burning Man community deserves and in the way we know we can.”

Arnone continued, stating that Showclix is sorry for “the distress this has caused” saying company officials are “redoubling our effort and commitment to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Shortly after the ticket sales began on April 10, Arnone explained: “We noticed an isolated service performing slowly.”

Typically ShowClix has “systems in place to automatically resolve these issues” but ShowClix officials noticed that the “automated system did not respond as quickly as anticipated.”

“We made the decision to manually intervene. Unfortunately, this manual intervention caused unintended side effects that ultimately lead to the issues that many of you experienced.”

Image: Bureau of Land Management