France asked its phone companies to stand ready to switch off social media during the protests, Blast reports

The French government prepared an off switch for social media before Saturday's marches, and it did the work by letter. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu wrote on Thursday to the heads of Orange, SFR, Free and Bouygues Telecom, the country's four big phone operators. He asked them to stand ready to suspend access to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and X, in his words in the event of urban violence. The French investigative outlet Blast published the letter and the minutes of the meeting that followed it.

Picture is an illustration of a protest march on a wide Paris avenue, with a demonstrator in the foreground looking at a phone that has gone dark and police lines in the distance.

Lecornu's office wanted the blocks limited to cellphones and to specific areas, and measured in hours. On Friday his cabinet held a 70 minute video call with the operators' legal directors. The minutes show the companies pushed back. They said they lacked the capacity to carry out the blocks at short notice, and they warned that people would get around them with VPN services and other messaging apps. The government has not responded to Blast's report, as of October 25.

France has done this once before. In 2024 the government blocked TikTok during unrest in New Caledonia, a French territory in the South Pacific. In 2025 the Council of State, France's highest administrative court, overturned that decision.

The letter went out two days before the second Saturday of the current protest wave. The Interior Ministry counted 410,000 marchers across the country on Saturday and nearly 1,000 detentions, as of October 24, against an organizers' count of about 800,000. The marches began over the cost of living and have grown into a wider argument about school funding and the chances open to young workers.