France's postal service La Poste got hit hard by a DDoS attack just days before Christmas, and it basically paralyzed their entire operation. Package deliveries went dark, online payments got stuck—exactly when people were rushing holiday orders.

This is a wake-up call worth paying attention to. When centralized payment infrastructure goes down like this, it exposes how fragile traditional systems can be during peak traffic. Millions of transactions halted overnight. Users couldn't access their accounts or complete purchases.

The attack highlighted something crypto folks have always argued: having payment flows dependent on single points of failure is risky. Whether it's postal services or payment gateways, DDoS vulnerabilities remain a serious threat to any system handling transactions at scale. La Poste's incident is just the latest example of why redundancy and decentralization matter in critical infrastructure. Worth reflecting on how different systems handle security during high-stress periods.