French officials on Monday accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of the cyberattacks that knocked out commercial refrigerators and freezers in hundreds of French shops in October, The Irish Times reported, citing Reuters. Ministers said there would be consequences, including summoning Iran’s ambassador.

Foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the ambassador had been called to the Quai d’Orsay and threatened further EU sanctions. The announcement came minutes after Reuters wrote that investigators privately suspected Iran. Iran’s UN mission did not reply; Tehran routinely denies hostile cyber operations.

On 11 October the attack overrode temperature controls on units in hundreds of stores. Some fridges were set so high they caught fire; staff dumped spoiled meat and melted ice cream. Experts said many devices ran outdated firmware that was easy to break into.

A second wave in November hit more than 100 sites across Europe and affected refrigerators used by French blood banks, forcing some stocks to be moved. Similar outages hit US military commissaries in August; the Pentagon is treating that as a possible cyber incident and is working with French investigators, without publicly naming a culprit.

The fridge hacks sit in a wider run of digital disruption linked to the 2026 US–Iran conflict — from Los Angeles transit to water plants and ships — amid fears of Russian sabotage in Europe and the rise of AI-assisted attacks.

France now explicitly ties the supermarket episode to the Revolutionary Guards and is preparing diplomatic and sanctions responses, while US probes into the commissary outages continue.

Image: Jean-Noël Barrot (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 / EU).

Sources consulted: French officials accuse Iran of carrying out refrigerator hacks — The Irish Times.