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Thousands of Yale community members were touched by Beatlemania Wednesday morning. 

Registration to attend a Feb. 16 event with Paul McCartney opened to Yale College students on Feb. 3, although preregistration tickets sold out within two minutes. On Feb. 8, tickets were opened to the general public and sales crashed within 10 minutes on YaleConnect after thousands logged on to claim their free ticket. The Schwarzman Center has since closed registration and will release the tickets on an unspecified date. 

“To those attempting to register, we extend our sincere apologies for the frustration this issue has caused,” Schwarzman Center Communications Director Maurice Harris wrote to the News. “We will soon set a new date and time when members of the public can obtain tickets. We will post those details on the Yale Schwarzman Center website and on social media.” 

McCartney, who received an honorary doctorate degree in music from Yale in 2008, is slated to speak about his new book, “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.” McCartney will converse  with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon and Langdon Hammer, a University English professor. 

According to the online details about the event, The Lyrics “encompasses McCartney’s earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles.” 

The book arranges the compositions alphabetically rather than chronologically to “provide a kaleidoscope” and records both McCartney’s song lyrics as well as the circumstances around the lyrics.

“I grew up hearing Beatles songs and music with him featured on it and reading about the event and how he details his musical journey through literature sounded super fascinating,” Marly Archie ’26 wrote to the News. “The people he is going to be in conversation with also seemed like such interesting individuals to hear from.”

The “extraordinarily high demand” for tickets resulted in the YaleConnect website shutting down shortly after it opened. The Schwarzman Center then suspended all public ticket sales until the technical team could fix the issue.

“I’m surprised that for such a high-profile event like Paul McCartney, Yale thought their dinky registration system would be able to handle all that demand,” Cristian Pereira ’25 wrote to the News. “Ticket sales for such an event should have been thought through and organized more thoroughly.” 

Yale Information Technology did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite technical difficulties, some members of the Yale community were able to secure tickets on Wednesday — including Michael Garman ’25, a former staff photographer for the News. 

“I just kept refreshing and trying to get the ticketing system to load so I could register,” Garman wrote to the News. “Eventually, after about an hour, I lucked out and was one of the few people able to get a ticket in the brief window while it was open.”

Tickets are currently unavailable to anyone “to ensure equity in the ticketing process” until their technical team resolves the issue. 

Paul McCartney is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with the Beatles for whom he wrote songs and played bass guitar.