France’s post office partly offline for over 12 hours after 'major network incident'

Might be Le Grinch, or a DDoS, but it's taking a while to fix

La Poste, France’s postal service, is largely offline, possibly due to an unexplained incident.

At the time of writing, the organization’s website offers only a brief message that opens “Notre site est indisponible” – our site is unavailable – and adds that its teams are doing all they can to resolve the situation quickly.

On its Facebook page, La Poste published a notice that states “A major network incident is currently disrupting all of our information systems.”

The notice states that the laposte.fr site is down, as is the Digiposte secure document storage service, La Poste’s digital identity service, and the La Poste app.

The notice also warns that some post offices may experience degraded service, but that over-the-counter transactions remain possible.

La Poste also operates a bank, Banque Postale, which is experiencing trouble.

On its X account, the bank told customers “An incident is currently disrupting the accessibility of part of our information systems. All our teams are fully mobilized to restore the situation as quickly as possible.”

Basic services such as payments and SMS-based 2FA remain available, but the bank’s app and online services are down.

French outlet Le Monde Informatique reports that La Poste says it’s experienced a DDoS attack.

Cloudflare’s Radar service records some traffic spikes on Monday, the day on which La Poste’s troubles began, but The Register cannot find evidence of malicious traffic targeting France in recent hours.

It is unclear if the incident will delay deliveries in the last two days before Christmas.

Whatever’s going on, La Poste appears to be struggling to restore services as the little information it has posted is ten or twelve hours old at the time of writing.

The Register will update this story if more information becomes available. ®