“Dancing With the Stars” is back, and fans wasted no time showing their enthusiasm. During night one of two of the Season 35 premiere, the excitement was so high that viewers flooded the voting site, causing it to crash!
For night one of the premiere, only text votes would be counted.
Text Votes Only for Night One
The male celebrities kicked off tonight’s two-night premiere, dancing to a song from the year they were born.
Shortly after the second performance of the night from Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess, co-host Julianne Hough confirmed that online voting had crashed.
“A quick update for everyone who is voting at home,” Hough announced. “This is coming through live right now: Voting on ABC is currently down live. So please make sure that you guys are texting for everyone.”
Later in the broadcast, co-host Alfonso Ribeiro shared that online votes would not go toward the live elimination.
“For tonight and tonight only, we are throwing out online votes,” he said. “So text only tonight.”
“Did we break it with the voting? This is kind of rad,” Hough added.
“We’re breaking stuff around here,” Ribeiro replied.
For the premiere, fans could text the first name of their favorite male celebrity to 21523. Fans of Conner Leavitt and Connor Wood, text CONNER L and CONNOR W to vote. Ten votes are allowed per number.
“DWTS” Premiere Breaks Voting Records
Despite online votes not being counted and only eight of the 16 couples competing, “DWTS” still broke voting records.
Before the live elimination, Ribeiro confirmed that voting records more than doubled from last season’s premiere.
“That’s amazing news and shows just how much you are engaged with this brilliant cast,” he said.
Dancing with the Stars Season 34 had viewers voting in record numbers, with nearly half a billion votes cast throughout the season. The finale alone generated 72 million votes and scored the show’s highest-rated finale in 10 years.
It seems this season is on track to continue meeting or breaking those records!
Hanson Fans Take Credit
When the ABC Voting site crashed, Hanson fans or “Fansons” were quick to take credit.
“This is the face you make when you know that your fans are the reason why the ABC website broke,” one user posted to TikTok. “He’s seen what happens to the tickets at his concerts. He knows the power of the Hanson fans.”
The comments were eager to agree.
“The younger viewers don’t understand what a big deal Hanson was,” a commenter said.
“I won my Hanson tickets by calling into a radio station and be the 103 caller back in the day, don’t underestimate us,” another commentor recalled.
“As soon as I saw the site was down, I said us Hanson fans broke it,” a user replied.
“I am responsible for at least 100 votes,” a reply said. “I went to the dive bar up the street and voted ten times from all the old people’s phones. I didn’t know any of them.”
Taylor Hanson and his partner Britt Stewart made it through the first elimination, so only time will tell if “Fansons” will crash the “DWTS” voting site on ABC next week.
