PARIS: Hackers raised the temperature of refrigerators and freezers at hundreds of French supermarkets to as high as 50 degrees Celsius, causing fires and spoiling food, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday.
“The large-scale attack affected connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France”, a statement said.
Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has instructed France’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) to investigate, his office said.
France was coordinating with European counterparts because other countries could also be affected, the office added.
Felix Aime, a cyber threat intelligence analyst, said Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium had also been affected.
Carrefour said 80 of its supermarkets were hit, while Monoprix, which operates about 490 stores in France, said five per cent of its stores were affected.
Les Mousquetaires, owner of retailer Intermarche, said fridges at around 150 of its stores were heated up to 50C for six hours. A spokesperson said all affected food had been discarded to eliminate health risks.
Paris resident Geert de Clercq witnessed staff at an Intermarche in central Paris throwing cartfuls of defrosted frozen food into a giant trash container, with molten ice cream sloshing out of broken tubs on the street.
Dominique Schelcher, CEO of a supermarket chain, said his supermarket group had also been targeted.
“Targeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and to the food supply of the French people is of extreme gravity and is unprecedented,” he wrote on X. There was no immediate estimate of industry-wide losses, but Intermarche CEO Thierry Cotillard told a television channel the “unprecedented” attack would represent losses amounting to “tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day”.
Christel Delberghe, director general at European retail association Eurocommerce, said: “This incident underlines the importance of resilience across the entire supply chain.”
Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2026
