Cyber attack on Anderson’s Bookshop ticket company crashes system during sale for Rebecca Yarros event in Naperville

Ticket sales for a highly anticipated meet-and-greet with bestselling author Rebecca Yarros at Anderson’s Bookshop were put on hold Tuesday after the Naperville store’s ticketing partner suffered a cyber attack, employees said.

As of Tuesday evening, tickets for the event — scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 11 — were still available but all sales closed until further notice, Anderson’s said in a social media post. The bookshop plans to release an update on the situation at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

“We are not able to share the number of tickets left at this time, but the remaining tickets will be made available at a future date once we can be sure that the ticketing site is stable again,” Anderson’s posted on Facebook and Instagram Tuesday evening.

Speaking with the Sun hours after sales system went down, Ginny Wehrli-Hemmeter, Anderson’s director of events and marketing, said, “I had no idea what the intention was (with the cyber attack), but what we do know is that it impacted all these people who are trying to get tickets to meet this author and, of course, we apologize for that.”

It’s not yet known if any customers’ personal information was accessed, Wehrli-Hemmeter said.

The store confirmed that any tickets successfully purchased before the crash are legitimate and will be accepted the night of the event.

Though Anderson’s has its own website, the bookshop facilitates all of its ticketing for events through Eventcombo, a third party site.

Eventcombo is an “all-in-one event management platform,” according to the organization’s website, which — as a whole — was back up and running Tuesday afternoon. The platform services thousands of clients around the world, its website says.

Wehrli-Hemmeter said Eventcombo’s entire website crashed earlier in the day.

“They’ve been great partners for us,” she said. “We’re never had an issue before. I’m sure their team was just horrified by all of (this) as well, scrambling to provide us with customer service as we were trying to provide our own customers with customer service.”

Starting about 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, Anderson’s phone started ringing with calls informing the bookshop that its ticketing site wasn’t working, an book store employee said. For the next hour, the longest pause between calls was about 30 seconds, he said.

Tickets for the Yarros event in November were to go on sale at 11 a.m. Tuesday. Anderson’s event is one of a few stops the author is making on a national tour promoting her upcoming book, “Iron Flame.”

“Other stops across the country sold out of their tickets within minutes. We were expecting to do the same,” Wehrli-Hemmeter said.

“Iron Flame” is the anxiously awaited follow-up to Yarros’ widely popular fantasy novel “Fourth Wing,” which was released in May. The sequel’s release date is Nov. 7.

There were 400 spots available to see Yarros at Anderson’s but how many were actually sold is not known yet.

“We couldn’t even log in on the back end,” Wehrli-Hemmeter said. “We had customers calling in, saying they have this ticket, asking if it was real. And I had no idea because normally, we just log in on our side and we can see if we had a ticket for them or not. But we couldn’t log in to see a darn thing either. We had no idea what was going on, which is not a great place to be at but (that was) all the information that we had at the time.”

Asked if customers’ who might have input personal information on Eventcombo’s website as they tried to buy tickets might be at risk of theft, Wehrli-Hemmeter said, “We are definitely asking the same things of Eventcombo and hope to have some answers from them on whether anything was compromised with their personal data.”

“We certainly would hope not,” she continued, “but I don’t know as of yet.”

Wehrli-Hemmeter said any communication Anderson’s receives from Eventcombo will be shared with customers so “we can resolve that (concern) as soon as possible.” She encouraged people to keep an eye on Anderson’s social media for updates.

tkenny@chicagotribune.com