Blast, a French news outlet, reported on 25 October that Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu asked France's four big internet providers to prepare a short block of social networks. His 22 October letter went to Orange, Bouygues Telecom, Free and SFR. It named Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. The block would filter domain names (DNS) for a few hours, only if urban violence returned. The letter called the plan exploratory and cited the 17 and 18 October protests.
Blast saw minutes of a call on 23 October with the providers' legal teams. They said they could not limit a block to mobiles or certain areas in the short term. They said a VPN or alternative messaging service would get around it, and they could not promise it would work. Their lawyers called it legally very delicate. Blast noted the Conseil d'État annulled a TikTok block in New Caledonia on 1 April 2025, while accepting the principle under strict conditions. Blast said the block was not used. The prime minister's office declined to comment.
DNS works like a phone book for site names. Removing an entry hides the service without stopping it, so a VPN can still reach it. Teams that rely on one social platform for marketing or customer service should note that a short national outage was prepared.