Many concertgoers buy their tickets online, but that wasn't possible Friday for several hours as a widespread cyberattack affected the ticketing agent for many music venues in Deep Ellum.
"There's never a warning for something like this," said Karen Cunningham, box office manager at the Bomb Factory. "It's like a flat tire. It just happens."
The Bomb Factory had a performance by Latina pop star Alejandra Guzman, and Steve Escalona had hoped to buy concert tickets over the internet.
"Not available. Not available. Not available," he said, describing his attempts to buy tickets online. "And it just kept pushing me out every time I tried to buy something."
Escalona ended up going to the box office in-person.
"You're like, wait, like people actually used to go to venues, hand them cash, and give them tickets to go to an event?" Mike Ziemer joked.
Ziemer is the founder of the So What Music Festival, which started Friday in Deep Ellum. "Nightmare," he said, about the internet outage. "For a festival like this, we've put a year's worth of work into it, so to wake up the morning of the festival and not be able to do your job is pretty much the worst thing ever."
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The So What Music Festival has more than 200 bands performing at nine venues over three days in Deep Ellum.
"I would tell my parents about something like this, and they'd be like, 'Oh, boo hoo! That's how everything used to be,'" Ziemer joked.
As they say, the show must go on.
Twitter, Amazon, PayPal, Spotify and Reddit were among the websites that were knocked out of service by Friday's cyberattack.
It is too early to determine who was responsible for the digital attacks, cyber experts and intelligence officials told NBC News.
