The French government has said telecommunication lines across France have been targeted by malicious vandals, causing connectivity outages as the Paris Olympic games hit full swing over the weekend.
The complete scale of the impact and whether the disruptions affected any Olympic events or venues is currently unclear.
Posting on Elon Musk’s X, however, Marina Ferrari, French Secretary of State for Digital Affairs said landline and mobile serves were affected by the attacks.
“Under my supervision, the Center for Defense Electronic Communications cooperates with operators until communications and services are fully restored,” Ferrari wrote.
“I condemn in the strongest terms these cowardly and irresponsible acts. Thank you to the teams mobilized this morning to carry out repairs and restore damaged sites to service.”
Reports in local press said connection lines owned by France’s main telecoms companies SFR, Bouygues Telecom, and Free had all been vandalized. Reuters reports that a spokesman for SFR said vandals had made cuts to its long-distance network in five different parts of France in the early hours of Monday. The impact on clients, the spokesperson continued, was minimal because the network was designed to reroute traffic.
France’s Le Parisien newspaper reported earlier that cables in electrical cabinets had been cut in southern France, and that installations in the Meuse region and the Oise area near Paris had been vandalized.
The telecoms attacks come just days after French railway company SNCF announced that its infrastructure had been targeted overnight by “a massive attack aimed at paralyzing the network”.
Per details reported by France Info, electrical and signal installations on high-speed lines running north, east, and west out of Paris boxes were deliberately set on fire in the early hours of Friday morning. An attempt to sabotage a south-west line connecting Paris with France’s second city of Lyon was foiled.
The attacks were particularly impactful because of the centralized nature of France’s rail network, with most major lines running into the French capital.
No individual or organization has laid claim to the acts of sabotage, which came just hours before France’s high-stakes Olympics opening ceremony on the River Seine.
Full operations on the French railways returned today.
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