Fyre Festival

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2017 · Instagram, then Twitter, from Great Exuma in the Bahamas · Also known as Fyre Fest; #fyrefestival; Fyre Cay; Fyre 2

What it is

Fyre Festival was a music festival due to happen on a Bahamian island in April 2017. It was sold as a luxury trip for rich young people, with villas, gourmet food, famous bands and supermodels. Tickets cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars. When guests landed there were no villas, the main acts had pulled out, and dinner was a cheese sandwich in a foam box. It was cancelled on the first day, and its organiser later went to prison for fraud.

Where it came from

Businessman Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule set it up to advertise Fyre, an app for booking musicians. In December 2016 Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski and other famous models posted the same plain orange square on Instagram, a phone app for sharing photos with followers. Many didn't say they'd been paid. Tickets sold on that buzz. In late April 2017 guests arrived on Great Exuma, found wet disaster-relief tents, and posted photos on Twitter while still stuck there. Two documentaries in January 2019, one on Netflix and one on Hulu, set off a second wave.

How people used it

In 2017 people who weren't there followed the collapse live, sharing guests' photos and laughing at them. The cheese sandwich photo became the main image. "Fyre Festival" turned into shorthand for any event or product sold as glamorous that turned out shoddy. After the Netflix film, people quoted producer Andy King, who said he'd been asked to offer a sexual favour to a customs official to get bottled water released, and used it as a joke about doing anything for a boss. People also raised money online for local Bahamian workers who were never paid.

Why it mattered

It was the first time many people saw plainly how influencer advertising worked: famous people paid to post a picture, often without saying so, and their followers buying on trust. A whole campaign had been built on one orange square. A lot of the fun was watching wealthy-looking buyers get stranded, though the people who lost the most were Bahamian staff and suppliers. McFarland pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2018 and got six years. His attempt at a Fyre 2 in 2025 also fell apart, which kept the name in the news.

The jokes around it

• The cheese sandwich: two slices of bread, two slices of cheese and some salad in a foam box, presented as gourmet catering.
• "Andy King would take one for the team", said about anyone going too far for their employer.
• Ja Rule's tweet insisting it was "NOT A SCAM", quoted back at him whenever Fyre comes up.
• The orange square, used afterwards as a symbol of paid celebrity hype with nothing behind it.
• "The Fyre Festival of ...", attached to any overhyped event that collapses, from conferences to concerts.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Thousands of people paid for a holiday because famous people posted an orange square. When it went wrong, the buyers photographed the collapse on their phones, and everyone else enjoyed it, mostly because the victims looked rich.

What noah is not sure of

Exact ticket prices varied by package and are reported differently. The exact wording of Ja Rule's tweet and the details of Andy King's customs story come from his own account in the Netflix documentary. Whether Fyre 2 or the 2025 Honduras pop-up ever properly took place is unclear.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.