France told mobile operators to be ready to block TikTok and Instagram

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu asked the country's four mobile operators to be ready to block TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat for a few hours during the 24 October protests. His letter, dated 22 October, went to Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues Telecom. The investigative outlet Blast published it on the evening of 24 October, and Clubic added the minutes of the follow-up meeting the next day. No social media block was switched on, and the government has not commented on the documents.

How France planned to block TikTok and Instagram

Lecornu pointed to the riots of 17 and 18 October, when, according to the government, looting and the movement of groups were coordinated on social networks. He wrote that he wanted to be able to "temporarily suspend access to these services" if urban violence happened again, and called the measure "exploratory".

• Platforms: Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. According to Blast, X was added after the letter was sent.
• Method: DNS filtering, mainly on 4G and 5G mobile networks. Fibre and ADSL were to be spared as far as possible.
• Duration: a few hours. Operators mentioned a possible suspension of up to twelve hours.
• Legal basis: the letter cites none.

Operators pushed back

On 23 October lawyers from the four operators spent 70 minutes on a video call with the prime minister's office, the General Secretariat of the Government and the Directorate General for Enterprise. According to the minutes reported by Clubic, the operators said they could not set up a block limited to mobile networks and specific areas at short notice. They also told officials that the block was easy to get around: switching to another DNS server was enough to restore access, and so was a VPN or a different messaging app. They called the measure disproportionate, because it would hit the whole country while being trivial to bypass.

The operators asked for a signed, dated, reasoned and published act. Orange wanted a formal decree. The prime minister's office chose a separate instruction to each operator, not published in the Journal officiel, plus a press release on the technical details.

The New Caledonia precedent

The government relied on a ruling by the Conseil d'État, France's top administrative court, from 1 April 2025. That ruling found the TikTok block in New Caledonia in May 2024 illegal, but it also accepted that a social network can be cut off without a specific law in exceptional circumstances, temporarily, and only when no less intrusive measure is available. The 2024 block lasted two weeks and had no end date, which the court called disproportionate.

Three days before the letter, former prime minister Gabriel Attal had publicly called for the power to switch off social networks in riot areas, as we reported on 19 October. At the time the government had announced nothing. The letter shows that the prime minister's office was already preparing the practical side.

What happened on 24 October

The protest passed off calmly. The interior ministry counted 400,000 participants, the CGT union 800,000. No platform was blocked. Instead, the government says it relied on faster cooperation with the platforms themselves: on 21 October the prime minister's chief of staff met Meta, Snap, TikTok, Reddit, Discord and Google, and according to the prime minister's office more than a hundred reports were filed before Saturday, about half of which led to accounts being suspended.

A block carried out through operators' DNS servers does not remove anything from the platforms. It only stops a phone from looking up the address, so it also cuts off people who have nothing to do with the riots, and anyone who uses a different DNS resolver or a VPN keeps access, as the operators themselves pointed out. How other European countries block sites and services without a judge is covered in our country-by-country guide.