French news sites go offline

SEVERAL major French news websites are slowly coming back online, having “gone dark” earlier today.

A number of sites hosted by the company Oxalide had went offline, including L’Express, Le Parisien, 20minutes.fr, the sites of Radio France, and Vanity Fair, Mediapart and Slate.

Having confirmed an “incident with its infrastructure”, Oxalide later tweeted:

La source des dysfonctionnements est identifiée. Une partie des services sont de nouveaux opérationnels. L’incident est toujours en cours.— oxalide (@oxalide) January 16, 2015

Le service est revenu à + de 90% mais subit encore quelques perturbations.— oxalide (@oxalide) January 16, 2015

The incident comes days after hackers targeted 20,000 French websites following last week’s terror attacks in which 17 people were killed - but Le Monde, which remained online all morning, has said that no one has so far claimed responsibility for this morning’s outage, and suggested that a technical fault may be to blame.

Photo: Davide Restivo