The man behind the Glastonbury glitch: ‘It was so close to being perfect – then we got unlucky’

Thousands of furious fans were shut out of the festival's live stream. For the first time, the man responsible explains what went wrong

Haim performing at Live At Worthy Farm
Haim performing at Live At Worthy Farm Credit: Anna Barclay/PA 

It was billed as a “spectacular five-hour livestream” and a “unique celebration” of Glastonbury Festival. But for tens of thousands of paying ticket-holders who tried to log in to Live At Worthy Farm at 7pm on Saturday May 22, the only emotion they felt was frustration.

An IT glitch meant that legions of people could not access the virtual event, which included pre-recorded sets by Coldplay, Kano and Haim from various locations around Glastonbury’s Somerset home. For a little under two hours, a proportion of the music fans who’d paid £20 a ticket were locked out. Twitter exploded, with people upset that their long-planned Saturday night had been ruined. Steve Brine, MP for Winchester and Chandler’s Ford, was among those unable to watch. He branded the situation a “shambles”. Other tweets were less charitable.

Down at Worthy Farm, Ric Salmon – the co-founder and chief executive of Driift Live, the company behind the event – was standing outside the farmhouse with Glastonbury co-organisers Emily Eavis and Nick Dewey, her husband, as 7pm came around. They soon realised something was wrong. “You have to remain calm but of course you feel sick to your stomach and you feel like your head’s been disassociated from your body,” says Salmon in his first interview about the night.

Eavis and Dewey were understanding and supportive, he says. They remain so. But he concedes that the period since that Saturday has been “the hardest couple of weeks of my life”.

As a sense of impending crisis replaced the air of anticipation on the night, both Glastonbury Festival and Driift put out a series of holding statements to try to calm the situation. Finally, at 8.44pm, Driift sent out a replacement link allowing ticket-holders to watch the event for free. Just after midnight, it released a fuller statement offering people the chance to re-watch the stream in numerous ways or apply for a refund. The statement added that the company was “devastated”.

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The glitch marred an otherwise slick event. Salmon apologises again and says it should never have happened. “Even if the stream is six and a half hours long, it’s not good enough if you can’t see the first 90 minutes of it. It is as simple as that,” he says. But the hitch inevitably raised questions about livestreaming for music-lovers, chiefly: is it worth it? And the snafu thrust Driift into the spotlight in a way it wouldn’t have wanted. Some questioned whether a company that has only been going for a year was right to take on such a mammoth task.

So what exactly happened?

Salmon confirms that the failure – as ticket-holders found out – was down to the access passcodes that customers were emailed not working (the precise “core” issue – the technicality within the technicality ­– is still being investigated). There was no problem with the stream itself, he says. Driift made sure of this by having “redundancy after redundancy” (back-up satellites) in place.

The access codes were meant to link to a microsite on which the stream was housed. But effectively the front door to the event remained closed. Salmon likens it to someone “buying a ticket for a concert and then the security guard not letting them in.”

He adds: “What we know for sure is that an issue existed with the access code themselves. There was no issue with the stream. One of the things you worry about with live streaming is that the stream itself can go down so that it’s either buffering, or the sound or the video quality isn’t good enough, or the satellite goes down and people are left with a blank screen. And the frustrating thing is that we went to such great lengths to ensure that that could not happen.” 

The problem arose because Driift is not an IT platform itself. Rather it is a producer and promotor of livestream shows. So it relies on various third-party tech partners to deliver certain aspects of the stream. In other words, while Glastonbury outsourced the running of the event to Driift, it in turn outsourced technical aspects to other companies. “At any one moment there might be four or five different tech partners that are delivering certain aspects of the service,” Salmon says. As soon as the problem became apparent, he and his team called the company in charge of the codes. The company said there were thousands of people already watching and suggested there was some kind of logjam. “But it then transpired it was a more complicated issue,” Salmon says.

All of this explains what happened internally. But the behind-the-scenes machinations will be of no consequence to ticket-holders who wanted to watch Wolf Alice. And it does rather suggest that the livestreaming industry is a series of disparate technologies cobbled together.

Wolf Alice performing at Live At Worthy Farm
Wolf Alice performing at Live At Worthy Farm Credit: Anna Barclay/PA 

Early data suggests that around 20 per cent of the audience were unable to get in for those first 100 minutes, Salmon says. He can’t quantify this exactly but it amounts to “tens of thousands of people”. Salmon won’t comment on how many of the affected people applied for a refund (ticket-holders had calmed down by the following morning, suggesting the number could have been less than feared). Nor will he name the company in charge of the access codes. But he says it isn’t See Tickets, which sold the tickets, or Jackshoot, the broadcasting company that Driift used. “It wouldn’t be right of me [to name the company] because there will have to be some sort of legal investigation into this,” he says.

Driift, which was making no profit from the event, is currently taking advice on how best to approach the investigation into what happened. It might involve bringing an external company in to carry out the review. Salmon says the probe will also look into suggestions that a cyber attack was to blame. I ask him whether there will be any legal action between any of the parties: will Glastonbury sue Driift, or Driift sue its tech partner? “I shouldn’t really comment on anything legal. But we are certainly looking into what our options are. There is no issue between Glastonbury and Driift,” he says.

The irony is that the show itself – once you were in – was bold and inventive. It captured the spirit of Glastonbury in combining vast spectacle, cosy togetherness, seemingly random occurrences and – yes – driving rain. It was also brilliantly staged, using lighting, drones and various Worthy Farm locations to great effect.

“It was so close to being perfect on every level,” Salmon says. Driift was working on it for five months. Towards the end there were up to 900 people on site.

Salmon concedes that the current IT outsourcing model needs looking at. “We have to find a solution to this going forward as we can’t be reliant on other people for these things. There has to be a robust solution because the problem is that one tiny link in the chain goes wrong and the whole thing f–––– up.”

Damon Albarn performing At Live at Worthy Farm
Damon Albarn performing At Live at Worthy Farm Credit: Anna Barclay/PA

And what of Driift itself? The company was formed at the height of lockdown last summer by Salmon and his colleague Brian Message at ATC Management, a management company that looks after the likes of Nick Cave and PJ Harvey. It has put on around 25 livestreamed shows since then including Laura Marling at the Union Chapel and Niall Horan at the Royal Albert Hall.

They’ve gone smoothly, although a colleague reported problems logging on to a recent Madness show. One of the reasons Salmon and Message formed Driift was to help an industry in obvious turmoil. You can’t argue with that – and they’ve raised lots of money for charity. But with only a year’s experience under their belt, were they really confident they could pull off something of Glastonbury’s magnitude?

“Yup. Yeah,” says Salmon. “And ironically we did. We did deliver it in every other aspect.”

Driift will carry on despite the dent to its reputation. “I’m loathe to paint any sort of positive picture on the back of the issues with Glastonbury. But at least when people see the scale of an event like that it really makes you think about how creative these kind of things can be,” Salmon says. Spotify has recently partnered with the company for five shows from the likes of Leon Bridges. Although the company got hammered on twitter, Salmon says social media is just “one prism”.

The rationale behind Live At Worthy Farm was to raise money for Glastonbury, which has cancelled for two consecutive years due to Covid, and to get people in the live music industry back to work. Salmon hopes there’ll be a “long tail” of how the film can generate funds over time, such as through future broadcast income. Driift has also made a financial contribution to Glastonbury.

Eavis and Dewey and the Glastonbury team “remain good friends of ours”, Salmon says. They appreciate that events on May 22 were out of Driift’s control. “It does happen, unfortunately,” says Salmon. “We just got hugely unlucky.”

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