Try Again: New Yorkers Get Another Chance at Free Tickets for Fireworks After Website Crash

All is not lost if you’re still determined to claim a free ticket for next week’s Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks. Just 2,000 lucky New Yorkers managed to apply successfully yesterday before the website collapsed under sheer weight of numbers — so today at 10am there will be another 8,000 up for grabs.

New Yorkers faced disappointment as application errors on Event Create thwarted their attempts to secure free tickets for the July 4th fireworks on the Hudson River — with many of them eventually getting blocked.

New York City was giving away 10,000 free tickets to New Yorkers eager for an up-close viewing of the Macy’s 4th of July fireworks display on the Hudson River — back on the West Side after 11 years. The event is estimated to draw three million people to watch each year.

Within five minutes of Wednesday’s scheduled release, more than 1 million people tried to log on to www.nycjuly4.com to claim 10,000 available spots. The site crashed with only 2,000 tickets spoken for, Brad Weekes, a City Hall spokesperson, told Gothamist . He added that technical issues on the third-party site had been addressed.

Prior to yesterday’s 10am ticket drop, only Pier 45 was listed as an available viewing location on both sites. Refreshing the page over the following 10 minutes produced a series of error messages, seemingly indicating the website had crashed.

For the first 15 minutes of refreshing the page, application errors continued — before the addition of a page that stated it was doing “human verification” to block out the bots trying to get tickets

W42ST reader Jenny Pierson commented “I’ve received a few different kinds of error messages for the 4th of July. The Mayor’s site wasn’t set up for the volume of traffic.”

Despite getting through this verification process, the website continued to crash before finally sending a message that we had been blocked by EventCreate.com

Frustrated New Yorkers took to Twitter/X with their initial batch of complaints to Mayor Eric Adams.

Just after 11am, visitors to the site got a simple text message, saying: “Thank you for your interest. This event has sold out!”

At lunchtime, Mayor Eric Adams took to Twitter/X to say: “Over 1 million people tried to get tickets to the Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks today.” He urged New Yorkers to visit nycjuly4.com tomorrow at 10am, as there are still tickets left. The Mayor also said: “There will also be miles of open space to watch the show that won’t require a ticket!”

What was your experience? Did you get tickets? Please let us know in the comments below.

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