DDoS News: France’s national postal service, La Poste, has confirmed that a DDoS attack disrupted its digital infrastructure, partially taking services offline and slowing parcel deliveries just before Christmas — one of the busiest periods of the year for the organisation.
The incident began this Monday, December 22nd, and has persisted over 12 hours, affecting multiple public-facing platforms and internal systems used to support postal operations. La Poste stated that while there is no evidence of customer data compromise, the attack directly impacted parcel distribution and online services.
Digital services knocked offline
As a result of the DDoS incident, several La Poste services became unavailable, including:
- laposte.fr website
- La Poste mobile application
- Digiposte secure document storage service
- La Poste digital identity services
La Poste acknowledged that some post offices were forced to operate at reduced capacity, though essential postal services at physical counters remained available.
Customers took to social media to report delays and uncertainty around parcel deliveries, with French media outlets noting that some people attempting to send or collect packages were turned away due to operational limitations.
With Christmas approaching, even short disruptions created visible logistical challenges across the network.
La Banque Postale also affected
The disruption reportedly extended beyond postal services to La Banque Postale, the banking arm of La Poste. The bank confirmed that access to its online banking platform and mobile application was temporarily unavailable.
In a public statement, the bank said:
“A computer incident has temporarily made access to our mobile app and online banking unavailable. Our teams are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.”
Despite the outage, card payments, ATM withdrawals, and SMS-authenticated online payments continued to function, limiting the impact on everyday financial transactions.
Confirmed DDoS attack, limited public telemetry
La Poste later confirmed that the incident was caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack, which overwhelmed parts of its digital infrastructure. The company has not attributed the attack to any specific threat actor.
Public internet telemetry showed traffic anomalies around the time the disruption began, though no sustained nationwide traffic surge was clearly visible in the hours following the initial outage. This suggests a targeted attack against specific infrastructure components, or a short but impactful attack window followed by prolonged recovery.
Extended recovery during peak period
While the attack itself may have been limited in duration, the extended service restoration highlights the downstream effects DDoS incidents can have on interconnected systems, particularly when postal, identity, and banking platforms share supporting infrastructure.
The timing — just days before Christmas — amplified the operational impact, with delays to parcel distribution and degraded digital services affecting both consumers and businesses.
At the time of writing, La Poste says remediation efforts are ongoing and that teams remain fully mobilised to restore all services.
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