Five telecom stations in France were hit on Sunday night in an attack that shut down some services. French authorities said the attacks looked like sabotage.
“It was an operation that was prepared,” the general director of the French Telecoms Federation, Romain Bonefant, told Reuters. “If it wasn’t people who work for us, it was people who had information.”
French regulators said the cuts only affected 11,000 people.
“Under my supervision, the Center for Defense Electronic Communications cooperates with operators until communications and services are fully restored,” Marina Ferrari, France’s minister for digital transition and telecommunications, said on X. “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.”
The attack happened during the Olympics and followed a similar attack on France’s high-speed rail system that occurred ahead of the opening ceremony. In that attack, someone set fire to three electrical and signal boxes that operate various bits of the country’s high-speed rail network. Early reports indicated that French authorities had disrupted additional, similar, attacks.
It’s not clear if the attacks on the railway line and the telephone systems are connected, but French law enforcement has declined to comment either way. But both attacks are being handled by France’s organized crime office and anti-terrorist task force.
Law enforcement might not say who it thinks is behind the attacks, but politicians don’t have the same problem.
“We have identified profiles of several people,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in an interview on France 2. “It’s traditionally the way far-left groups act.”
While news broke of the telecommunications attacks, French law enforcement announced it had detained a suspect connected to the train sabotage. According to the AFP, the man had pliers, keys to rail equipment, and far-left political literature
