Ticketmaster Chairman Barry Diller might still be trying to wash the taste of foot out of his mouth after Visa responded to his recent comments about the credit card company’s alleged role in the Bruce Springsteen ticketing controversy.
Diller explained during a Feb. 10 Live Nation / Ticketmaster investors conference call that the New Jersey ticket snafu that caused numerous fans of the Boss to receive error messages and redirects during the onsale Feb. 2 wasn’t in fact due to faults in TM’s system, but Visa’s.
“It had to do with, I think, Visa that couldn’t process the data,” Diller said. “So it kind of froze the system for a bit. When it froze the system, essentially what Ticketmaster screens said was it couldn’t do anything.
“It couldn’t process tickets and another screen came up and said you could go back, try your thing again, you could modify, etcetera, and on the other side of the screen it said you could also go to TicketsNow, which is our reseller, sister company.”
Visa, which apparently hadn’t discussed the issue with Diller, found the explanation just a bit puzzling.
“We were surprised by the comments of Ticketmaster CEO Barry Diller regarding their recent ticket issues,” a Visa spokesman said in a statement. “Ticketmaster’s characterization that an earlier technical ‘glitch’ impacting its online ticket sales was related to Visa’s systems is inaccurate. Visa’s processing network was fully functional on February 2 with no authorization issues. In fact, VisaNet has run with nearly 100 percent reliability for the past decade.”