France Faces Twin Power Sabotages: Are the Cannes and Nice Outages Linked?
Consecutive Blackouts in the French Riviera Raise Concerns Over Coordinated Attacks on Critical Infrastructure
Within two days, two major cities along France’s sun-soaked southern coast were plunged into unexpected darkness. Even as the Cannes Film Festival was about to anoint its cinematic winner, an arson attack blacked out electricity to more than 160,000 households. Twenty-four hours later, 45,000 households went dark in neighboring Nice. Now French investigators are working to find out if France power cut were one-offs or the leading edge of a larger, coordinated attack on national infrastructure.
A Festival Marred by Fire and Disaster
Trouble started to brew early Saturday morning of 24 May 2025. Firefighters were dispatched to an electrical substation in Tanneron west of Cannes, where fires were soon confirmed to be an act of arson.
Even after the fire was put out, the city’s electricity supply was far from secure. Soon after, a pylon carrying electricity in Villeneuve-Loubet was discovered damaged, on the verge of collapse. This led authorities to shut off a separate electricity line, extending the blackout.
Tourists navigated intersections where traffic lights flickered black. Cars were directed by hand by police, while elevator rescues flowed throughout the city.
During one screening of Sound of Falling, audiences waited on the edge of their seats for almost 20 minutes after the screen faded to black, only coming back to life when a generator revved up. On the last day of the festival, Cannes appeared to be briefly powerless — literally and symbolically.
The following night in Nice, a disturbingly similar scenario unfolded. At around 2 a.m. on Sunday, flames engulfed a power substation on the city’s western edge, triggering blackouts that disrupted operations at the airport and halted tram services. On-site, investigators found telltale signs of foul play — tire tracks near the scene and a forced entry point, all pointing toward intentional sabotage.
Though electricity was restored within a few hours, the back-to-back nature of the Cannes and Nice attacks has left both officials and locals rattled, with mounting fears that the region’s key infrastructure is under coordinated threat.
The deputy mayor of the city went further by suggesting the fire was “most likely of a criminal nature.”
A wake-up call for France’s energy security
The Claim of Responsibility raises the stakes. Adding to the complexity, a posting on a little-read anarchist site claimed responsibility for the attack. Calling themselves a band of anti-capitalist saboteurs, the group said the action was intended to upset “the machinery of cultural elitism” and the “neon spectacle of capitalism” embodied in the Cannes Film Festival.
Targets next would be not only airports and institutions of science, they said, but possibly even banks. The posting is being sifted for authenticity by the intelligence agencies, who are monitoring it and seeking to see if a pattern of similar manifestoes develops.
No claim has been made for the Nice assault, though the parallels of timing, modus operandi, and targets are difficult to ignore. The absence of forced entry or ransom demands further fuels the theory these were ideological rather than economic assaults.
France’s grid operator, RTE, has been swift to react, diverting electricity where it can and strengthening key transmission points. But while attacks remain the subject of ongoing arson investigations, authorities are left answering tough questions: How were two substations so easily breached? Were signs of sabotage overlooked in advance? And most urgently — is further sabotage coming?
Last year, sabotage of railroad infrastructure shut Paris down for a week during the opening of the Olympics. The trend indicates a new challenge: ideological groups who attack public infrastructure not to make a profit, but to draw attention and cause disruption.
