- La Poste suffers major network incident, disrupting all online services and apps
- Banking operations partly functional: SMS authentication, ATMs, POS payments, and WERO transfers remain available
- Cause unclear: suspected ransomware, but local media suggest possible DDoS attack
France's national postal service, La Poste, is currently seeing outages due to a “major network incident” at one of it's busiest times of the year.
In a short announcement published on the organization’s Facebook page, it was said that all of the organization’s information systems are currently disrupted.
“Our online services—La Banque Postale online and mobile app, laposte.fr, Digiposte, La Poste Digital Identity, and the La Poste app—are temporarily unavailable,” the announcement, machine-translated, reads.
2FA works
At press time, the laposte.fr website was indeed offline, showing only a short message saying “Our website is unavailable.”
“Our teams are doing everything possible to restore the situation as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience caused.”
La Poste also said that for banking customers, online payments remain possible with SMS authentication, and that cash withdrawals at ATMs, card payments at in-store POS terminals, and transfers via WERO, were still available.
However, Banque Postale, a bank operated by La Poste, seems to be experiencing issues, as well. On X, it said that an incident was currently “disrupting the accessibility of part of our information systems. All our teams are fully mobilized to restore the situation as quickly as possible.”
Payments and SMS-based 2FA was said to be working unabated, while the bank’s app and online services were forced offline.
“Service may be temporarily degraded at some post offices. However, you can still carry out your banking and postal transactions at the counter,” La Poste added on Facebook.
The postal service did not say what kind of incident it was experiencing. Such a highly disruptive attack bears all the hallmarks of a ransomware attack, however local media Le Monde Informatique says this is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, instead.
According to The Register, the Cloudflare Radar service recorded “some traffic spikes” on Monday, but not enough to conclusively state it was a DDoS incident.
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