Online services for several French banks and La Poste unavailable
Payments can still be made but personal spaces on websites and apps are not accessible
Mobile banking apps are unavailable alongside personal spaces on bank websites
fizkes/Shutterstock
Several French banks are experiencing technical issues this morning, leaving customers unable to access online services or smartphone apps.
Banque Postale, Caisse d’Epargne, and Banque Populaire are all facing the issues, affecting millions of customers.
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.
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 officials 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.
