La Poste confirmed on Monday that all its information systems were knocked offline by “a major network incident,” disrupting digital banking and online services for millions of customers.
The disruption left multiple platforms temporarily inaccessible, including the postal service’s main website, mobile app, digital identity service and the Digiposte document storage platform. Some post office locations experienced service interruptions, but staff said customers could still carry out banking and postal transactions at service counters.
La Banque Postale, the banking arm of Groupe La Poste, confirmed that its online and mobile services were down while saying core banking operations remained functional; it said payments, interbank exchanges and flow processing were operating normally and that ATM withdrawals, in-store card payments and transfers via WERO remained available. Online card payments were being completed using SMS authentication as an alternative to the usual certification method.
When the report was published the La Poste website remained unavailable and redirected customers to its webmail and Digiposte platforms.
La Poste has not provided a timeline for full restoration or disclosed the nature of the incident. French news outlets reported the outage was caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that disrupted operations nationwide, French news outlets said.
La Poste is a publicly owned company with more than 250,000 employees and forms part of Groupe La Poste, which provides mail, parcel, banking, insurance and mobile services. The outage follows an earlier incident this month and the arrest last week of a 22-year-old suspect in an unrelated cyberattack on the email servers of France’s Ministry of the Interior.