Without question, one of the most coveted tickets of the global festival calendar is Burning Man. If you’re not familiar with the annual event, which takes place in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, just know that anyone who’s been will likely describe it as “living on a different planet for a week”.
The event features non-stop music, rave parties, legendary art installations, and some 40,000 revellers all coming together to enjoy the festival’s motto of “community, art, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance” before the ceremonial burning of “the man” (a 40ft wooden effigy).
Despite attracting an attendance of up to 40,000 revellers, who come from all over the world to basically build a makeshift city in the middle of the Nevada dessert, Burning Man sells out within a matter of hours every single year. Last week saw 40,000 tickets selling out in just one hour.
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But according to a recent report from Wired, there were a few line-jumpers this year. Software engineers in Silicon Valley reportedly hacked into Burning Man’s ticketing system, powered by Ticketfly, to cut to the front of the 80,000-strong queue and nab themselves tickets.
In the spirit of karma, Burning Man officials announced on Friday that they will find and cancel the hacked ticket orders. “The good news (for us, not them) is that we can track them down, and we’re going to cancel their orders,” said to Megan K Miller, Burning Man’s director of communications.
“Steps are being taken to prevent this from happening again in future sales,” Ms Miller added. According to Wired, the 200 software-savvy would-be Burners jumped the “first come first serve” online queue by exploiting a design flaw on the ticket page that allowed them to generate a spot ahead of everyone in the line.
Jonathan Hart, a software engineer at Idle Games in San Francisco, tweeted that he had somehow navigated Ticketfly’s web servers and “crawled out” with two tickets to Burning Man. In fact, it didn’t take long before Twitter was awash in reports of hackers cheating Ticketfly’s system.
“Approximately 200 people created a technical ‘backdoor’ to the sale and made their way to the front of the line,” read a statement from Burning Man officials on Thursday. “Absolutely no tickets were sold before the sale opened, but they were able to purchase the first batch of tickets when the sale started.”
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Burning Man have copped to the error on their site and claim the hacked tickets will be put back on sale during the scheduled last-minute sale in August. However, it’s not the first time that the Burning Man ticket distribution system has been hit with criticism from frustrated fans.
In the past tickets have been distributed via a lottery system, which was labelled unfair by many, and a conventional website, which would experience frequent crashes. When it comes to Burning Man, there simply aren’t enough tickets to meet demand, and the hacking scandal has led to many complaints of being cheated.
Furthermore, this isn’t the first time that Silicon Valley residents have been an unwelcome presence at Burning Man. Last year’s festival received negative feedback after various venture capitalists, executives, and celebrities attended the event complete with air-conditioned camps, their own PAs, and other VIP perks.
