Sacré Bleu: Ticketmaster Suspends Taylor Swift Tour Ticket Sales in France After Record Demand

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour keeps on breaking records…and Ticketmaster. The digital ticketing platform suspended ticket sales for the Paris leg of Swift’s tour, shortly after they went on sale this morning, promising French Swift fans a cruel summer.

As the pop singer-songwriter winds down the U.S. leg of The Eras Tour, Swift is setting her sights on Europe next summer after a jaunt through Central and South America, Asia, and Australia. Tickets for Swift’s six night stop at Paris La Défense Arena and Groupama Stadium in May and June 2024, respectively, were set to go on sale this morning for French Swifties in three windows—9 a.m. and 11 a.m. local time for her May shows at Paris La Défense Arena in Nanterre and 1 p.m. local time for her shows at Groupama Stadium in Lyon. However, shortly after the 11 a.m. purchasing window began, Ticketmaster France announced it would be pausing ticket sales indefinitely, citing customer issues with the website. More than a million French Swifties queued for tickets, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“The 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Eras Tour for Paris La Défense Arena has been put on hold. We will keep you posted with a new on-sale time as soon as possible. All codes not already used will remain valid,” Ticketmaster France wrote at 11:14 a.m. Central European Summer Time in a translated tweet.

The company updated shortly ahead of the 1 p.m. sale in another tweet: “The Eras [Tour ticket sale] scheduled for 1 p.m. for Lyon—Groupama Stadium has been put on hiatus We will keep you informed of the new on-sale time as soon as possible. All codes will remain valid.”

The pause in ticket sales is a sore spot for Swifties across the world, after American Swifties were greeted with a similar fiasco when demand for tickets to The Eras Tour broke Ticketmaster last fall before the tour even began. At that time, Swifties were able to enroll in a presale lottery prior to tickets becoming available to the general public. Lucky fans would receive a special code that would allow them to access tickets before they went on sale to the rest of the world. Presale officially began on November 15, 2022 at 10 a.m. ET, and just a few short moments later, Ticketmaster was down for the count. Later that day, Ticketmaster eventually cancelled the general sale all together.

Related: Presale Postmortem: Swifties, Now Is the Time to Overthrow the Ticketmaster Monopoly

The incident wound up radicalizing Swifties and shining a spotlight on Live Nation Ticketmaster’s alleged monopoly on the live entertainment industry, with several politicians and the Department of Justice calling for an investigation. In a subsequent January 2023 hearing, cheekily titled “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” Live Nation Entertainment President and CFO Joe Berchtold testified that the company has done nothing but improve the artist-fan relationship since Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010, and that Ticketmaster wasn’t to blame for The Eras Tour disaster, it was just those damn bots.