25 October 2026Blast · Privacy & digital policyCurated

DNS block on call: how France wanted to switch off TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and X

Summary

Journalist Yanis Mhamdi publishes a letter in the French online outlet Blast in which Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, on 22 October 2026, asks the four major internet providers to be ready to block Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram for a few hours via DNS filtering on instruction; X was added later. According to the minutes of a video conference the following day, the providers doubted feasibility, effectiveness and legal basis, and the block was not triggered for the demonstration on 24 October. This post explains the technology and the legal framework and takes a clear stand: keeping a switch ready to cut communication channels is censorship and has no place in a democracy, no matter how well it works.

What the letter says

The letter of 22 October 2026 went to the heads of Orange, Bouygues Telecom, Iliad (Free) and Altice France (SFR). Lecornu justifies it with the riots on the fringes of the protests of 17 and 18 October: several social networks had not only spread calls to action but also served for coordination, for example for looting, agreeing on targets, moving groups and tracking police positions.

Technically, the request is clearly defined: Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram are to be made temporarily unreachable by filtering their domain names (DNS). Fixed-line connections should be spared as far as possible, all other services on fixed and mobile networks left untouched. The providers are to prepare the steps immediately so that they can block for a few hours without delay on instruction; the letter names the weekend of 24 and 25 October as a possible date.

Two requirements concern network operation: the block should be as targeted as possible without disadvantaging any provider against the others, and each operator must be able to stop it immediately if it seriously threatens its network. The letter explicitly asks for confidentiality and calls the measure merely exploratory at this stage.

What the providers objected to

According to Blast, the government's general secretariat, the Prime Minister's office, the Directorate General for Enterprise and the legal departments of the four providers met on 23 October for a 70-minute video conference. The government wanted to limit the block to mobile networks and certain regions; the providers replied that this was not feasible at short notice. They pointed out that a VPN or another messenger is enough to bypass the block and that they could not guarantee its effect.

On the legal side, the providers' lawyers criticised the nationwide scope, the easy circumvention, which calls the necessity into question, the proportionality of blocking three platforms for up to twelve hours and the lack of proof that milder means had been exhausted. They demanded a signed, dated, reasoned and published legal act, and Orange insisted on a decree (arrêté). The government considered an individual instruction to each provider without publication in the official journal sufficient and planned an announcement about 30 minutes before activation at around 2 pm on 24 October.

The block was not triggered. According to the Interior Ministry, 400,000 people joined the demonstration; according to the CGT trade union, 800,000. The Prime Minister's office declined to comment to Blast.

The Conseil d'État's standard

The government relied on the Conseil d'État's decision of 1 April 2025 on the TikTok block in New Caledonia in May 2024. The highest administrative court considers a shutdown without a statutory basis possible in exceptional circumstances, but only under three conditions: it must be indispensable to deal with particularly serious events, no technical means for a milder measure may be immediately available, and its duration must be limited from the outset to the time needed to find such alternatives, for example blocking individual features.

The court declared the block in New Caledonia unlawful: it was total and open-ended for as long as the unrest lasted, without being tied to the search for milder means. The letter of 22 October clearly follows this line by limiting the block to a few hours.

What a DNS filter at the provider achieves

With a DNS block, the provider's resolver no longer answers queries for the blocked names, or answers with a wrong address. The platform's servers remain reachable. Only those using the provider's resolver are affected; anyone running their own resolver, using a public resolver or DNS over HTTPS in the browser or operating system notices nothing, unless the provider additionally intercepts port 53 or blocks addresses. A VPN routes name resolution through the tunnel anyway.

The difficulty lies in drawing the line: large platforms load content from many further domains and content delivery networks. Filter too narrowly and the app half works; filter too broadly and related services are hit. On top of that, cached answers keep working until their validity (TTL) expires. This explains why the providers would promise neither a regionally limited block nor its effectiveness.

Our position: switching off is censorship

Whether a block can be bypassed is irrelevant to how it should be judged. Even a technically perfect block would be wrong. Wikipedia describes censorship as the attempt to control human expression, mainly by state bodies, in order to steer discourse and suppress unwanted content. That is exactly what a switch does that lets a government cut, on the day of a demonstration, the channels people use to organise, report and document police violence. That it is supposed to last only a few hours changes nothing: those are precisely the hours that matter.

Legally, the term is narrower. “There shall be no censorship” in Article 5(1) of the German Basic Law refers only to prior censorship, that is, review before publication; interventions afterwards count as subsequent censorship and are not prohibited per se. The Conseil d'État, too, considers shutdowns permissible under conditions. This is exactly why the legal standard is not enough. In a democracy, every form of censorship must be rejected: the temporary kind, the well-justified kind, and the kind that is merely prepared.

Since the blocking orders issued by the Düsseldorf district government in 2002, the Chaos Computer Club has warned that blocking infrastructure, once built, soon gets used for more and more purposes. Germany's Access Impediment Act (Zugangserschwerungsgesetz) of 2009 drew what was then the most successful online petition; it was never applied and was repealed in 2011. France shows how this unfolds: first TikTok in New Caledonia, now a nationwide shutdown prepared with providers on standby. In 2017, Amnesty International documented how Ethiopia blocked 16 news sites and WhatsApp to prevent reporting on attacks against protesters. The pattern is always the same: things are switched off when the state itself is being watched.

A state under the rule of law has other means against looting and violence: it prosecutes the acts and the perpetrators under existing law. What it must not do is silence everyone else as a precaution.

Ideas

A DNS block only changes the provider resolver's answers, not whether the servers are reachable.
With your own or an encrypted resolver, the provider's DNS block has no effect.
A prepared block lowers the threshold for triggering it on the next occasion.
Providers demand a published, reasoned legal act instead of an individual instruction.
A shutdown remains censorship even if it works perfectly.
Blocking by region or access type is hardly feasible at short notice.
During protests, social networks also serve documentation, not just coordination.

Insights

The technology for such interventions is already in place at many providers because resolvers are used for block lists anyway; in Germany, for example, large providers implement the CUII's recommendations this way. The line between a copyright block and a politically motivated shutdown is therefore legal, not technical.
The debate about effectiveness is misleading: anyone whose only objection to a block is that it can be bypassed has no objection left once it works. The question is not whether a state can effectively cut communication channels, but whether it may, and in a democracy the answer is no.
A confidential individual instruction with 30 minutes' notice effectively postpones judicial review: the court ruled on New Caledonia about eleven months after the block.

Quotes

“Je souhaite pouvoir disposer de la faculté de suspendre temporairement l'accès à ces services en cas de réitération de violences urbaines.” (Sébastien Lecornu in the letter of 22 October 2026; roughly: I would like to have the option of temporarily suspending access to these services should urban violence recur.)
“Sobald diese etabliert ist, wird es nicht lange dauern, bis tausende Seiten gesperrt werden, sei es aus politischen, wirtschaftlichen oder sonstigen Motiven.” (Chaos Computer Club on blocking infrastructure, page “Internet-Zensur”; roughly: Once it is established, it will not take long until thousands of sites are blocked, whether for political, economic or other motives.)

Facts

The letter of 22 October 2026 went to Orange, Bouygues Telecom, Iliad (Free) and Altice France (SFR).
Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram were to be blocked via DNS filtering; according to Blast, X was added later.
Activation was planned for around 2 pm on 24 October, with an announcement about 30 minutes beforehand.
On 1 April 2025, the Conseil d'État declared the open-ended TikTok block in New Caledonia in May 2024 unlawful.
The block was not triggered; between 400,000 (Interior Ministry) and 800,000 (CGT) people joined the demonstration.

References

Critique

Blast bases the section on the providers' objections on meeting minutes which, unlike the letter, have not been published; these statements therefore cannot be verified.

Remarks

The letter itself names only Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. It also requires that each provider can end the block immediately if it threatens its network; the article does not mention this requirement.
Blast is a donation-funded, independent outlet and takes a clear stand against the shutdown in its last section; bk99.de shares this position.

Recommendations

To prove a suspected DNS block, query the same name with dig @<provider resolver> and dig @<own resolver> and compare the answers.
Run a recursive resolver such as Unbound on your own network; on corporate networks, keep in mind that DNS over HTTPS also bypasses your own filters.
Anyone informing customers or citizens via social networks needs a fallback such as their own website, a mailing list or their own Mastodon instance.
Speak out against network blocking wherever it is being prepared, and support organisations that have worked against it for years, such as the Chaos Computer Club, the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Amnesty International.

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