A suspected cyberattack disrupted services provided by French postal service La Poste on Monday, delaying package deliveries and online payment systems during the holiday season.
The company said in a statement that a “major network incident” had disrupted its information systems, which included services operated by its online banking arm, La Banque Postale and the laposte.fr website, which displayed a message stating that it was currently unavailable. Services may be temporarily disrupted at some post offices, it said.
A spokesperson for La Poste told French news outlet BFMTV that the outage was due to a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, a kind of cyberattack that floods websites or servers with traffic in order to overwhelm them and force them offline.
La Poste did not immediately respond to a message from Bloomberg News seeking comment.
In a November press release, La Poste said it was anticipating handling nearly 180 million parcels through November and December during the peak season for its deliveries.
Hackers are known to have targeted mail services in the past. In 2023, a criminal group used ransomware to shut down computers operated by the UK’s Royal Mail, causing significant disruption to deliveries of international packages.
Photograph: Packages on a conveyor belt at a La Poste SA sorting facility in France. Photo credit: Cyril Marcilhacy/Bloomberg
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