When thousands of Taylor Swift fans, known as Swifties, took the day off work and tried to buy tickets to her upcoming 2023 tour through Ticketmaster yesterday, many were distressed to find that they were having quite a lot of difficulty doing so.

In a scene that was reminiscent of a hyped-up video game launch, Ticketmaster had multiple connection issues, places in queue dropped and overall failures to properly buy tickets from thousands of Swifties, creating an uproar of angry sentiment online about the company and a flood of memes.

If Chick Fil A was in charge of the Ticketmaster queue I would’ve had Taylor Swift tickets within MINUTES just saying

— Lauren (@Laurparkerr) November 15, 2022

ticketmaster is like “we’re sorry about all the technical problems, this demand was unexpected” as if taylor swift isn’t one of the biggest artists in the galaxy

— jessica (@enchantedjess13) November 15, 2022

ticketmaster trying to fix this god awful website rn pic.twitter.com/Rnapy7I7IT

— Lyndsey 🕰| fan account (@wisteriawillows) November 15, 2022

dear ticketmaster pic.twitter.com/QHXNNX4NhB

— mad elegant 🐍 (@sydinrealtime) November 15, 2022

The Ticketmaster queue and process were purportedly so bad that the anger became concentrated, not just on Ticketmaster's website, but the company as a whole and the industry of ticket sales being primarily through Ticketmaster as a form of a monopoly.

This caused a large surge in pushing for Ticketmaster to be broken up, which even resulted in politicians like AOC and Ilhan Omar weighing in, giving their support to the destruction of Ticketmaster as a corporate entity.

it’s honestly impressive how ticketmaster has single handedly monopolized the live event industry for YEARS and yet they still can’t run a functioning website

— bella ⚔️ (@achingblush) November 15, 2022

Swifties being radicalized against monopolies and getting ready to do some anti-trust lobbying good luck ticketmaster

— Elamin Abdelmahmoud (@elamin88) November 15, 2022

Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.

Break them up.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 15, 2022

Break up Ticketmaster. https://t.co/oFxUrNmfSs

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 15, 2022

At the same time this drama was unfolding, however, World War III was also starting to spark (at least according to the memes), but you wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at the trending page.

Seeing World War 3 trending, expecting it to be about ticketmaster, but it's really because Russia fired missiles into Poland…. oh god pic.twitter.com/KGrXE8tdQc

— PLUTO (@Pluto_Shmurda) November 15, 2022

Russia attacking Poland and maybe starting WWIII trending lower than Taylor Swift fans mad Ticketmaster isn’t letting them buy presale is the funniest thing I’ve seen all day. pic.twitter.com/OvHXDDBJ3H

— Alex Palmer (@HowDoIBeWhole) November 15, 2022