Ticketmaster blames ‘global outage’ for Australian Grand Prix ticket sale delay

Australian Grand Prix and Ticketmaster have apologised to fans after they were forced to delay ticket sales minutes after they went on sale.

Tickets for the Melbourne event went on sale at 12pm AEDT on Tuesday, but fans were left frustrated after they were unable to purchase tickets as soon as they went on sale.

Ticketmaster blamed a “global third-party outage” for the malfunction, with both the agency and Australian Grand Prix apologising to fans in a statement.

“Due to a global third-party outage, the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix 2025 general public onsale will be delayed until tomorrow Wednesday 9 October 12pm AEDT. We apologise for any inconvenience,” they said.

But the statement did little to appease angry fans with many questioning the outage.

One fan posted a screenshot of Ticketmaster’s API (Application Programming Interface) status page, which showed every feed was operational.

“What do they mean by third-party outage? Is it a website problem or something else?” One fan asked.

Some fans were in the waiting room for tickets from 11am, while others pointed to the controversial “in-demand” pricing scheme that sees prices jacked up during a sale.

“You just figured this out at 12.10pm? Not 11am when you said waiting room opened? Just happy to leave people frustrated for 70 minutes?” One fan said.

“Might have been handy to know before we wasted our time trying to get tickets!” Another said.

“Legally extorts people for a living and still can’t manage to administer your core purpose. Pathetic,” another said.

“So this basically means the prices will be tripled tomorrow?” Another said.

“You had 1 job to do!!!” Another added.

“Of course it’s a third party’s fault. More like you couldn’t allocate enough tickets as “in demand” to rip everyone off an extra $300 so you decided to postpone it. Absolute joke,” another said.

“So focused on creating in demand pricing to rip off your working class customers, you can’t even manage to work a normal sale (your sole purpose btw)!! Do better,” another said.

“So we take time off work to get these tickets, and then you dont even have them, get screwed. What a joke, you and Ticketmaster deserves to be looked at. Also what stupid excuse is “global third party outage,” another said.

Next year’s Grand Prix is scheduled for March 13-16 in Melbourne.

Ticket prices have been hiked up across the board.

The cheapest general admission ticket for Albert Park will cost $169, which is a $20 increase on this year’s event.

Australian Grand Prix CEO Travis Auld explained the reason for the price change.

“What we’ve tried to do year-on-year is limit the increase of the base price but the realities are the cost of holding a Formula One event is increasing, I think the cost of holding global major events is increasing,” Auld told News Corp.

“We are seeing unprecedented demand and we have got to try and balance that with keeping the event as accessible as possible and we’ve had a lot of conversations around that.

“People have different views around that but that is certainly the intention.”

The last two events have sold out in record time and next year is expected to be the same with local hope Oscar Piastri a genuine contender, fellow Aussie Jack Doohan making his F1 debut and Lewis Hamilton racing for Ferrari for the first time.