Cyberattack cripples La Poste and La Banque Postale services across France

A major disruption affecting France’s national postal and banking services has been traced to a suspected distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, severely impacting online systems during the peak of the holiday season.

The incident, which began on the morning of Monday, December 22, rendered multiple digital services operated by La Poste temporarily inaccessible, including the websites and mobile apps for La Banque Postale, LaPoste.fr, Digiposte, the La Poste Digital Identity platform, and the official La Poste app. According to the company’s statement, the issue stems from a “major network incident” that has not yet been fully resolved more than 24 hours later.

Initial reporting by Le Monde, citing company sources, confirms the attack involved a DDoS operation that overloaded La Poste’s infrastructure with excessive traffic, leading to widespread outages. While La Poste has not publicly attributed the attack to any specific actor, the nature of the disruption aligns with previous high-volume, service-denial tactics often seen in politically or economically motivated cyber operations. As of this writing, no threat actor has claimed responsibility via known ransomware or leak portals.

La Poste, which handled approximately 2.6 billion parcels in 2024 and employs over 200,000 people, plays a critical logistical and financial role in France’s public infrastructure. Its subsidiary, La Banque Postale, is one of the country’s major retail banks, with millions of customers relying on its services for daily financial transactions. The ongoing disruptions have had tangible real-world impacts, including delayed mail and package deliveries, reduced banking functionality, and operational slowdowns in post offices across the country, especially given the proximity to Christmas.

While online banking functions via the app and website remain down, La Banque Postale has redirected transaction verification to SMS-based authentication, allowing customers to proceed with card payments and ATM withdrawals. Physical transactions and in-person banking operations at post office counters are still available, though services may be degraded in some locations.

Despite the scale of the incident, La Poste has emphasized that there is currently no evidence of a data breach or compromise of customer information. Their teams are actively working to restore services and reinforce the network’s defenses, though no estimated timeline for full restoration has been shared.