Kansas City, Missouri: Garth Brooks Shuts Down Ticket Sales for Third Show After Bots Crash the Sale

Kansas City fans who lined up online Friday morning for Garth Brooks tickets ran into a wall of bots, and by midday the sale was off.

Ticket sales for Brooks's third Kansas City show, a Saturday matinee added only two days earlier, were shut down Friday due to what organizers called "excessive bot activity." The sale for the November 7 matinee at the T-Mobile Center had opened at 10 a.m. Central Time through AXS. Brooks and the promoters are evaluating next steps and the future of the show, according to a statement from Team Garth that the T-Mobile Center also shared. No new on-sale date or time had been announced by Friday afternoon.

"The bot situation is out of hand. It's been progressively getting worse on this tour," Brooks said in his own statement minutes later. "With that said, my concern is for the people who managed to buy tickets today for the third show in Kansas City before the bots crashed the on sale. I will personally look into what can be done. You have my word that all that can be done will be done. You have my deepest apologies for the results and my most sincere appreciation for your efforts today."

A third show added Wednesday

Brooks announced the third show on Wednesday, October 21, after the first two Kansas City dates drew heavy demand. The matinee is set for Saturday, November 7, ahead of the evening performance the same day, with an evening show also scheduled for Friday, November 6. He left Sunday open because the Chiefs play that day. Brooks has previously sold out the T-Mobile Center 16 times.

Every seat for the added show was priced the same: $155 in total, made up of a $140 ticket price, a $5 facility fee and a $10 service charge, plus taxes, according to a news release. Tickets were sold through AXS, with no presales.

Brooks plays Tulsa, Oklahoma, this weekend at the BOK Center, before the Kansas City dates in November and shows in Seattle on November 13 and 14.

Bots have hit this tour before

Kansas City is not the first stop where bots broke a sale on this tour. Last month, the on-sale for a third added night in Salt Lake City, Utah, was disrupted by bot activity, and Brooks later added a fourth show there. His team has made fighting scalpers and bots a running theme of the tour, keeping one price for every seat in the house and speaking publicly each time a sale is disrupted.

The problem reaches well beyond one tour. Earlier this month, singer Raye said the sign-up for an intimate concert was overwhelmed by scalpers using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations. For Kansas City fans, the immediate question is narrower: whether the tickets bought before Friday's shutdown will stand, and when the rest of the matinee seats will go back on sale.

Fans who hold tickets for the November 6 and November 7 evening shows are not affected by Friday's shutdown, which covered only the added matinee sale.