The Fyre Festival made news in 2017 for being so horrible that the founder got a six-year prison sentence for fraud, and several lawsuits are pending. But there have been many festivals that were overhyped and underproduced, or just ended up being terrible for one reason or another. Take the third TomorrowWorld electronic music festival, hosted on a rural farm in Georgia in 2015. Things were going well until it started to rain.
We're not kidding about the "post-apocalyptic hellscape" part either -- you can actually put "and then the crows came" after every sentence for the rest of this entry and it won't seem out of place at all. The rain turned the site into a muddy bog, which would have been manageable, but then the organizers suddenly announced that they would no longer be able to provide the shuttle service that was supposed to take non-campers back into Atlanta on Saturday, stranding everyone in the middle of nowhere as night arrived. Thousands of drunk EDM fans ended up stumbling for miles through dark and muddy woods, desperately seeking a way out. Some people collapsed and had to be carried, while others gave up and slept in the forest without shelter.
Witnesses described seeing "Walking Dead hordes" of increasingly hungover and dehydrated David Guetta fans moving listlessly through the trees. Others described it as "like the Hunger Games," which is hopefully an exaggeration, unless surviving staff from the face-painting tent disguised themselves as rocks to hide from bands of spear-wielding feral teens. Once the march hit a road, people banged on bus windows and lay down in the road to stop vehicles from driving away without them. Desperate marchers pooled cash and formed competing alliances trying to bribe drivers to take them out. Ubers and cabs flocked to the area, charging a small fortune to ferry the wealthier revelers to safety. Which might actually be a fun glimpse of the real Tomorrow World, if the worst predictions about climate change are on the money.
There's more to that story, and those of other massively-oversold festivals centered around food, Christmas, and music, which you can read about at Cracked.