Hundreds of thousands struggle to secure tickets to Peter Kay’s comeback tour

The new dates were announced in two waves and a post on Kay’s social media jokingly described the latest shows as “additional extra dates”.

Customers of O2, Virgin Media and Three were offered access to presale tickets two days earlier, but also faced huge demand, with some services crashing.

O2 and Virgin said it was “by far the highest demand we’ve ever seen for priority tickets in 15 years”.