French left-wing primary extends first round after bot traffic hits e-votez voting platform

France’s left-wing presidential primary, jointly organized by the Socialist Party (PS), Place Publique and GRS, extended its first-round online vote after the e-votez platform was hit by heavy bot-driven traffic on Oct. 9. Organizers said the disruption prevented some registered voters from casting ballots and pushed the deadline from Saturday at 8 p.m. French time to Sunday at 6 p.m. Patrick Mennucci, head of the organizing committee, told AFP that only 20,000 people had voted by 7 p.m. Friday, out of roughly 140,000 registered voters. He said the system returned to normal at 6:45 p.m. A later summary in the report said turnout had passed 70,000 by 8 a.m. Saturday. The committee said the platform was never fully interrupted and that the integrity of recorded ballots was not affected. Le Parisien cited organizers as saying the system usually handles up to 10,000 simultaneous connections, while the attack pushed that figure to 20,000. French tech outlet Numerama described the incident as a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack that overloaded the service without breaching the system itself. Paris prosecutors have opened an investigation, according to AFP, and France’s national cybersecurity agency ANSSI has also stepped in.