London, UK - Oasis fans faced a massive struggle to secure general sale tickets for the band’s comeback tour as booking websites experienced outages and bugs.

Manchester-based promoter SJM Concerts’ website Gigs and Tours faced issues even before tickets went on sale for the UK shows at 9 AM local time, with excitement at the Gallagher brothers' reunion reaching fever pitch.

The site displayed messages saying: "Please bear with us. At the moment there are a lot of people on the site looking for tickets, so we have put a queuing system in place, which is completely normal."

"This page will refresh automatically and we’ll get you where you want to be as soon as a space opens up. Thank you for your patience!"

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Similar issues were encountered on the ticketmaster.ie page for the two shows at Dublin’s Croke Park, which went on sale at 8 am.

Instead of a page opening to buy tickets, an error number was displayed, which usually indicates a webpage is unable to handle any more connections.

The same issue was reported by some UK fans for ticketmaster.co.uk.

However, the page refreshed after a period to tell concertgoers that they were in queue, and "when it’s your turn, you will automatically be able to browse events and shop for tickets."

IT experts also said there is a "huge possibility" that high numbers of tickets were being booked by bots.

Ticket re-sellers often use automated software to buy more tickets for events than they are allowed, only to sell them on at higher prices.

Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at software security firm Eset, told the PA news agency that some groups have the right software and knowledge to manipulate ticket websites, and even use bots to "swoop in and purchase high numbers of tickets at once."

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"Being the next series of concerts since the demand for Taylor Swift tickets, I would suggest there would be a huge possibility of bots being used to swoop in."

People on social media reported being suspended from the Ticketmaster website after being mistakenly identified as bots.

"Bots mimic the activity of real users and even manipulate their location using off-the-shelf software such as a VPN," Moore said.

"This is usually counteracted using bot detection software but this can often produce false positives when real users are assumed to be bots themselves."

Industry expert Adam Leon Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, said the inevitable popularity of the Oasis reunion was "bound" to lead to website glitches.

Smith said using automated tools or bots is the "most common way" of making money from tickets in 2024.

Adam Webb, of campaign group FanFair Alliance, said it is "really hard" to know how many tickets are being purchased by touts because there is a "lack of transparency" on reselling websites.

He went on: "There’ll be an awful lot of listings."

"I suspect that people won’t have actually bought the tickets and they’re listing them for sale."

Ticketmaster itself faced accusations of artificially inflating ticket prices by adding a so-called "in-demand" category for both seating and standing.