Malicious acts of unprecedented scale on the national fiber optic network, the origin of which remains unknown, led to slowdowns and internet access cuts in several major French cities, including Grenoble, Besançon and Reims on Wednesday. and Strasbourg.
“This kind of incident of this magnitude never happens,” a source familiar with the matter told AFP. “It’s the first time, and we don’t know who it is, at the moment,” she continued, indicating that monitoring devices had been put in place to prevent this from happening elsewhere. .
“Cable cuts have been confirmed in Ile-de-France impacting the fixed and mobile network”, tweeted the Secretary of State for Digital Cédric O.
The Zone ADSL site has identified 9,156 breakdowns on the fixed Internet in France in the past 24 hours, mainly disturbing the customers of the operator Free and to a lesser extent SFR.
“The attacks took place tonight at 4:00 a.m. Since this morning, the teams have been mobilized,” the operator Free told AFP, hoping that the network will be “restored during the day”.
Several of its customers have complained on Twitter that they no longer have any internet speed via their Freebox following a blackout that occurred during the night.
“Three of the four arteries of Free”, called “backbone” and which constitute “the spine of their network have been vandalized”, indicated other sources.
SFR for its part confirmed “several fiber cuts” around Lyon and in Ile-de-France, confirming the trail of vandalism.
– “Digital terrorism”? –
According to initial findings, these are inter-regional “long distance” optical fiber cables that run along highways, railways and waterways, which have been deliberately cut in several places, including the Paris-Lyon and Paris link -Strasbourg.
“The teams are on deck” and the “work is in progress”, further indicated SFR, which manages several “sheaths” of optical fibers used in particular by Free and alternative operators.
On the other hand, their competitor Bouygues Telecom “does not use the links affected by these malfunctions and mobile and fixed services are provided normally,” the group told AFP.
Orange is also not affected by the cuts, according to a company spokesperson.
The backbone of an Internet network, the “backbone” is used to interconnect Internet traffic between different geographical areas using very high-speed fibers.
“It’s a kind of + fiber hub +”, explains an industrialist in the sector. “When you cut that, you cut access to an entire region”.
A cut can however be circumvented thanks to the interconnection of the networks and the operators can thus provide a degraded service.
“It’s a bit like if highways were cut, and traffic had to be redirected to national ones,” commented Sami Slim, managing director of Telehouse, one of the hubs of internet traffic in France.
“Is this an act of digital terrorism? Perhaps. There was a major impact there because the coordination of the attacks on the cables was well done, by people who inevitably know the network”, estimates with AFP Nicolas Guillaume, director of the alternative operator dedicated to professionals Netalis .
The latter, who intends to file a complaint, suffered “either very strong slowdowns (in traffic), or rare service interruptions for a little over 2 hours” in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region.
InfraNum, the federation which brings together all the French digital infrastructure manufacturers, on Wednesday condemned “firmly this irresponsible aggression” on fiber optic networks.
“Given the essential and strategic nature of networks today, such cuts are likely to have dramatic consequences, such as the delay of personal rescue operations,” lamented its president Philippe Le Grand, who insists “on the need to launch a major network resilience plan. »
In March 2020, telecom cables were intentionally cut in Ile-de-France, Vitry and Ivry (Val-de-Marne), temporarily depriving tens of thousands of Orange subscribers of internet access while that data centers saw their operations disrupted.
A complaint had been filed and an investigation opened, but one of the parties to the case told AFP on Wednesday that he had “no news from the authorities” on this subject.
