SM Entertainment confirmed that Aespa will play Gocheok Sky Dome on December 6 and 7, but fan-club presales on Interpark crashed within minutes as more than 480,000 users queued for 28,000 seats.
Interpark said a database connection pool misconfigured for legacy membership tiers caused 37-minute checkout delays. The company issued 50,000 won vouchers to buyers who lost carts, though fan unions demanded a full re-run supervised by the Fair Trade Commission.
Scale of demand
Aespa’s latest mini-album topped Gaon charts for three weeks, and the group’s world tour stopped in Los Angeles and Paris before returning home. Promoters added a second dome night after resale prices on secondary markets exceeded 800,000 won for floor sections.
City logistics
Seoul city officials asked SM to stagger subway exit announcements with police crowd units because Gocheok station lacks the wide plazas seen at Jamsil. Merchants near the dome reported hotel bookings up 40 percent for the concert weekend.
What’s next
General on-sale opens Monday with captcha and queue tokens Interpark rebuilt over the weekend. SM said there are no plans for additional nights, but industry executives note that dome holds for K-pop acts increasingly sell out before public release.
Ticketing technology
Interpark engineers migrated the queue service to a Kubernetes cluster with autoscaling rules tied to fan-club verification spikes. Third-party monitors recorded peak concurrency at 482,000 sessions, nearly double the load seen for a rival girl group in August.
SM Entertainment said light-stick inventory for the dome shows will ship only to buyers who complete identity checks, another step to curb scalping bots.
Local merchants near Guro Digital Complex reported a surge in photocard trades as fans camped overnight for general-sale practice runs on the ticket app.
Ticketing analysts said the presale crash will likely push regulators to finalize queue-fairness rules drafted after a 2025 concert meltdown in Busan. SM pledged to share load-test results with the culture ministry before general on-sale.