Major French government websites, including the tax office, weather forecaster and multiple préfectures, were offline on Wednesday afternoon after an alert over ‘critical vulnerabilities’.
Users trying to use the French tax website impots.gouv or access their local préfecture’s website on Wednesday were met by an error message informing them that the site was down.
Meanwhile the national weather forecaster Météo France said that it was taking both its main website and its weather alerts site offline for a temporary period.
The reason given was that a “critical vulnerability” had been detected in the programming language PHP, used by a huge number of organisations.
These vulnerabilities “could lead to remote code execution without authentication”, states the PHP Foundation on its website, without providing further details.
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The company said that it had deployed a fix, but it not clear how long the sites will be offline.
Meanwhile Météo France says that it will continue to issue weather forecasts and, if necessary, alerts via its social media channels.
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— Météo-France (@meteofrance.com) 21 October 2026 at 16:42
French websites have been the victim of major cyberattacks in recent weeks, with organisations including the tax office and the finance minister targeted. Hackers also attacked the networked fridges of French supermarkets, forcing them to throw away millions of euros of food.
Separately, on Wednesday, the phone operator Orange reported a major outage in its phone and internet networks.
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