Taylor Swift fans were in for a treat on Tuesday when the pop sensation sent them on a virtual Easter egg hunt to discover her new song titles, “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” but faced technical difficulties.
Swift announced her upcoming re-recording of “1989” last month during a performance in Los Angeles, and that “Taylor’s Version” will feature previously unreleased songs. Vault songs have been included on her three previous re-recordings as an added benefit to fans who stream and purchase the albums.
Swift previously revealed the track vault for “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version)” by posting a video of the letters being shuffled.
Google announced on Tuesday that its search function will populate a series of 89 puzzles that fans can solve to eventually reveal the names of these new songs.
“You’ll be helping Swifties around the world get out of the forest (or unlock the safe) as they all work together to solve 33 million puzzles,” said Google. “And that’s how it works, that’s how you get vault track titles!”
Some international fans first noticed the small blue vault populated Saturday when they searched for “Taylor Swift,” building anticipation as Swifties waited to reveal what the vault meant.
The puzzle began with the vault revealing a scrambled version of the title of Swift’s upcoming album and revealed more puzzles as participants entered answers into the search box.
But many fans (including this NBC News reporter) think it was fault when they search for answers with no subsequent progress.
Some fans were frustrated that they couldn’t participate, or were upset about the large number of puzzle completions required when the game didn’t work properly.
“I feel like Taylor keeps forgetting how big she is,” one user posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “33 million is a lot when you consider that the vault doesn’t work. Google has to work out who’s playing the game and who’s actually trying to find sunglasses, which I think is what’s going to screw it up.”
Next he joked“We definitely won’t be 33 meters before the album comes out with this stupid safe not working.”
Google reached out post errors on X late Tuesday.
“Swifties, the vault is jammed! But don’t worry, there are no empty spaces inside,” the company wrote. “We are in our era of repair and soon we will be out of the woods.
A representative for Swift did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Swift published a clip Tuesday afternoon opening the blue safe on her Instagramcaptioning the video “You can tell me when the *search* is over… if the high was worth the pain.”
Searches for “Taylor Swift” spiked after the post and remained high for several hours, according to Google Trends data. Swift reached its peak Google search interest on Tuesday at 3:00 p.m., two hours after her post, before falling slightly.
“1989 (Taylor’s Version)” is set to be released on October 27th, exactly nine years after the release of the original.
