Every ticketing outage we've been called in to diagnose had warning signs weeks before the actual on-sale. Here are the five we see most often.
Ticketing traffic isn't a smooth ramp — it's a vertical spike in the first 90 seconds. If your load test ramps gradually over ten minutes, it isn't testing the thing that will actually break you.
Without a virtual waiting room, every user hits your checkout flow simultaneously, and your database connection pool becomes the bottleneck. A queue doesn't just protect infrastructure — it protects the fan experience by setting expectations.
If seat inventory is locked via a synchronous database transaction held through the entire checkout flow, you've built a system that degrades linearly with concurrent shoppers. This needs to be a short-lived reservation, released aggressively.
We've seen entire on-sales go down not because of ticketing infrastructure, but because a single downstream payment provider throttled requests. Always have a fallback path.
The best infrastructure in the world doesn't help if nobody knows who's on call, what the rollback plan is, or how to communicate status to fans mid-outage.
If more than two of these sound familiar, it's worth a conversation before your next on-sale, not after.
