Adele’s new album is setting sales records and her fans have rushed to buy concert tickets for her upcoming tour. The influx of fans has crashed some of the concert ticket websites but more importantly, a number of Adele fans were able to view other people’s personal details when attempting to buy tickets online. 

The fans in question were attempting to buy tickets for the UK portion of her tour and the sale was organized by a live concert tracking and ticketing service called Songkick. The company released the following statement regarding the issue: “Due to extreme load experienced this morning, some of our customers were incorrectly able to preview limited account information belonging to other customers. There’s no evidence that this included credit card numbers or passwords. We take the privacy of our users very seriously, and we’re looking further into the matter to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

The BBC reports that the glitch in question did reveal sensitive details such as credit card numbers, quoting several users who claim that other people’s names, addresses, and credit card information was exposed: “After queuing for an hour and half, we clicked the tickets we wanted [and] got pushed through to another screen but different tickets were selected. We went with these anyway because we thought otherwise we'd lose out. But when we got to the next screen, where you fill in your details, all of the boxes were already filled in with somebody else's name, somebody else's address and somebody else's credit card number." A number of similar experiences were also reported on Twitter. 

If you are affected in the breach, begin regularly checking your bank and credit card statements for odd charges, as early detection is one of the best ways of repairing such damage. Additionally, be wary of potential phishing campaigns that could capitalize on such a breach. Any calls or emails which purport to be from your bank or credit card provider should be treated with a high degree of suspicion: don’t click on any links contained in such emails, download attached files, or provide sensitive information to the caller or sender.