La Poste's Digital Services Disrupted by Major Incident

France’s national postal service, La Poste, is currently experiencing a significant outage affecting its digital and operational services. As of now, the organization's website displays only a brief message stating, "Notre site est indisponible" ("Our site is unavailable"), with team efforts underway to resolve the issue swiftly.

Service Outages and Disrupted Platforms

On its official Facebook page, La Poste reported that a major network incident is disrupting all of their information systems. This has led to the unavailability of several key services:

• The laposte.fr website
• The Digiposte secure document storage service
• La Poste’s digital identity platform
• The La Poste mobile app

Additionally, some post offices may experience degraded service levels, though in-person transactions can still be conducted.

Impact on Banking Services

La Poste also operates a banking division, Banque Postale, which has been affected by the outage:

• Its online banking platform and app are currently inaccessible
• Basic services like payments and SMS-based 2FA (two-factor authentication) remain operational
• The bank reports that they are working diligently to restore full service

In a statement on X (formerly Twitter), Banque Postale confirmed that an incident is impacting their information systems, but assured customers that their teams are mobilized to restore normal operations as soon as possible.

Possible Causes and External Observations

According to reports from Le Monde Informatique, La Poste suspects they have suffered a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. Cloudflare’s Radar logs noted traffic spikes coinciding with the start of the outage on Monday; however, the source of malicious traffic targeting France remains unconfirmed.

Ongoing Uncertainty and Potential Delays

It is uncertain whether this incident will affect postal deliveries, especially with Christmas just days away. La Poste has offered limited updates, with their latest publicly available information being over ten hours old, as they continue to work on service restoration.

Conclusion

The situation remains fluid, and updates will be issued as new information becomes available. The outage highlights ongoing vulnerabilities in critical digital infrastructure and the importance of cybersecurity measures.

The Register will monitor developments and provide updates accordingly.