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Major IT failure hits French banks and La Poste

Personal online spaces and apps have been down since 6am

A man looking annoyed at his phone
Mobile banking apps are unavailable alongside personal spaces on bank websites
Published Modified

Several French banks are experiencing technical issues today, leaving customers unable to access online services or smartphone apps. 

Banque Postale, Caisse d’Epargne, and Banque Populaire are all facing issues, affecting millions of customers. As of 2:30 PM (French time) today, the issues are still ongoing.

Issues are also being reported on the La Poste, Colissimo and Digiposte websites, with all receiving error messages saying services are not available. It means some parcel-tracking websites are unavailable, and La Poste announced 'disruption' to parcel deliveries is expected today. 

"The delivery of parcels and mail to homes is disrupted but is being maintained at this stage, as is their collection from post offices," said La Poste earlier today in an announcement.

There is "no visibility on when services will return to normal" the postal service added.

Websites have been unavailable since around 06:00, according to website Downdetector.

Those undertaking late Christmas shopping do not need to fret however, as physical bank cards are still functioning, as are bank transfers through WERO payments. 

Online transactions can be made through SMS authentication for requests.

“Since early this morning, an incident has affected access to [users’] online banking and mobile apps. It is being resolved; our teams are doing everything possible to restore service quickly,†said La Banque Postale. 

The Caisse d’Epargne bank was hit with a similar issue last Thursday (December 18), as was Banque Postale over the weekend.

La Poste confirmed earlier today that the outage was the result of a cyberattack, which came in the form of a 'distributed denial-of-service', or DDoS.

This sees infrastructure overwhelmed with fake requests, causing slowdowns and crashes, invalidating genuine attempts from users to log on. 

La Poste also confirmed that no user data was inappropriately accessed during the attack.