La Poste, the French national postal service, confirmed on Monday that all its information systems were knocked offline by "a major network incident," disrupting digital banking and online services for millions of customers.

On social media, La Poste announced that the disruption rendered multiple platforms temporarily inaccessible, including its main website, mobile app, digital identity service, and the Digiposte document storage platform.

Some post office locations experienced service disruptions, though officials said customers could still conduct banking and postal transactions at service counters.

"For banking customers, online payments remain possible with SMS authentication. Cash withdrawals from ATMs, card payments at in-store POS terminals, and transfers via WERO are still available," La Poste said.

"In some post offices, service may be temporarily disrupted. However, it is still possible to carry out your banking and postal transactions at the counter."

La Poste's website was still down when this article was published, redirecting customers to its webmail and Digiposte platforms.

​La Banque Postale, the banking arm of Groupe La Poste, confirmed that its online and mobile services were also down, but said core banking operations remained functional.

"The bank's essential services are not impacted. Payments, interbank exchanges and flow processing are operating normally. Cash withdrawals from ATMs, in-store credit card payments and transfers via WERO remain accessible," it said.

"Online, internet and mobile card payments remain possible with SMS authentication to replace certification via Certicode."

While the postal service has yet to provide a timeline for complete service restoration and disclose the nature of the incident, French media outlets reported that the outage was caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that disrupted the company's operations nationwide.

La Poste is a public-owned company with over 250,000 employees part of the Groupe La Poste, which handles everything from package shipping and mail delivery to banking, insurance, and mobile telecommunications services.

This comes after French authorities arrested a 22-year-old suspect last week in connection with a cyberattack on the email servers of France's Ministry of the Interior earlier this month.