A breakdown occurred on 11 September and continued until the next day in the departments of Tarn and Aveyron. The authorities said: "Following deliberate damage to two relay antennas, 52,000 Bouygues and SFR subscribers were affected by a loss of network".

The exact details of this failure were not communicated, but the authorities nevertheless made it clear that it was in no way accidental. Indeed, a relay antenna and a TDF pylon were set on fire in Albi.

These actions were also denounced by the Secretary of State for the Digital Economy, Cédric O, on Twitter: "I strongly condemn the arson of a TDF tower which affected the network of SFR and Bouygues Telecom subscribers, and the communications of 50,000 people in the Tarn and Aveyron."

This event takes place in a very particular context. For more than a year now, we have been witnessing arson attacks on 5G antennas throughout France and Europe. While the police are investigating, some do not hesitate to claim responsibility for their acts, as was the case with the anarchist movement, according to Ouest-France.

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Source : Presse citron

On August 30th, the U.S. Internet service provider CenturyLink suffered a major technical failure. A misconfiguration in one of its data centers caused damage to the entire Internet network.

Involving both a firewall and BGP routing, this technical failure spread outside CenturyLink's network. This error also affected other Internet Service Providers (ISPs), ultimately causing connectivity problems for many other companies.

The technology giants whose services were disrupted include Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft (Xbox Live), EA, Blizzard, Steam, Discord, Reddit, Hulu, Duo Security, Imperva, NameCheap, OpenDNS, and many others.

Also severely affected, Cloudflare said that CenturyLink's outbound spread problem has resulted in a 3.5 percent drop in global Internet traffic. This would make it one of the largest Internet outages ever recorded.

According to CenturyLink's status page, the problem originated at its data center in Mississauga, a city near Toronto, Canada.

The ISP says the root cause of the incident is an incorrect Flowspec ad. Its Mississauga data center reportedly sent an incorrect Flowspec announcement, preventing the company's BGP routes from taking root.

As CenturyLink's incorrect Flowspec command caused some of the routers in its network to fail, some of these routers also began announcing incorrect BGP routes to other nearby "tier 1" Internet services. This caused other networks to fall into a domino effect.

CenturyLink solved the problem by taking the unprecedented step of telling all other "Tier 1" ISPs to disconnect and ignore all traffic coming from its network. Companies rarely make these kinds of decisions because it results in a total loss of connectivity for all their customers.

As a result, the ISP had to reset all equipment and start with clean BGP routing tables, a process that took nearly seven hours, the company said.

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Source : ZDNet

On May 5th, a massive Internet outage occurred for companies and employees confined to the south of Paris following acts of sabotage on the Orange fibre network. This was a major blow at a time when more than 100,000 of the operator's customers are teleworking.

In addition to teleworkers, entire corporate networks are being badly affected. And this act of sabotage is likely to have a major impact on the services of other operators. A ZDNet reader and system and network administrator for a company operating two data centers in the Paris region, Justin reveals that the incident began yesterday at 9:30 am: "Despite the redundancy of our 10 BGP fibers, we were heavily impacted. At our level, we had 6 fibres out of 8 cut, with the operators Iliad, Zayo, Sypartech and partially Jaguar". At 10:00 am this morning, he reported that he still had "one fiber in default between his two datacenters".

10 cables were severed at the dismantling machine in the communes of Ivry-sur-Seine and Vitry-sur-Seine yesterday. Orange's internet and telephone network is therefore severely disrupted in the Val-de-Marne and part of the city of Paris.

After noting the damage, the operator dispatched technicians to the site to carry out the necessary repairs. Orange estimates that 34,000 Internet customers and 12,000 business customers are potentially affected by the outage. Orange Ile-de-France's communications department said: "The priority customers identified are being restored as a matter of priority, the technicians will be taking turns and work will continue throughout the night for a gradual recovery and an end to the recovery is planned for Thursday night for Ivry-sur-Seine and is currently being assessed for Vitry-sur-Seine".

The operator filed a complaint and the department's judicial police was seized.

According to franceinfo, a note from the territorial intelligence services mentions a clear upsurge in acts of "degradation" and "sabotage" throughout the territory. 27 incidents have been recorded since the end of March. While these facts are not claimed, the majority of territorial intelligence agents favour the ultra-left route.

At the beginning of April, two relay antennae were set fire to in a small commune in the Jura for an estimated loss of one million euros. A fibre-optic cable was cut in the Gard department, depriving more than 23,000 subscribers of telephone and Internet access for 12 hours. Damage to base stations was also reported in Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

According to this note from territorial intelligence, the authors would seek to destabilise economic activities and teleworking through such sabotage.

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Source : ZDNet