France’s national postal service,  La Poste and its banking arm, La Banque Postale, were knocked offline on Monday in a distributed denial-of-service attack that disrupted services at the height of the Christmas season.

The attack rendered La Poste’s online services, including its website, mobile applications, mail tracking and the Digiposte digital vault, unavailable across France. Online banking services offered through La Banque Postale were also severely affected, resulting in millions of customers being unable to access accounts or authorize transactions via digital channels.

While online services were knocked offline, La Poste said that home delivery of parcels and letters has been disrupted but is still operating, as is collection from post offices. Core banking functions such as ATM withdrawals, point-of-sale card payments and transfers via text-message authentication remained functional.

La Poste also noted that there had been no impact on customer data.

The Record reports that there were widespread delays in parcel deliveries and that some people attempting to send or collect parcels were turned away from post offices.

French prosecutors have opened an investigation into the attack, but no group has yet claimed responsibility. There is some suggestion that Russian-linked hackers may be behind the DDoS attack and it’s more than likely that they were, given ongoing tensions in Europe, but that is yet to be confirmed.

According to the most recent update from La Poste, the DDoS attack was still ongoing as of today. Access to online postal services had improved, but the situation overall “remains unstable.” Online banking services were also reported to have resumed, but customers may face delays.

The DDoS attack came after France’s Interior Ministry reported a separate breach of sensitive email servers and cybersecurity authorities flagged attacks on other national assets in early December.

DDoS campaigns, like the one targeting La Poste, were a key theme in Cloudflare Inc.’s annual year in review released on Dec. 15.

Some 3.3% of traffic running through Cloudflare during 2025 was blocked as DDoS or web application firewall rule violations. So-called hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks also grew significantly, including a major July campaign that heavily skewed global mitigation charts.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons