Several fiber optic cables carrying broadband service across France were cut overnight, marking the latest attack on the country's infrastructure during the Olympic Games.

Ironically, the saboteurs missed the cables connecting Paris, the glittering host of this week's Olympic festivities, and the games themselves, remained unscathed.

Nevertheless, this marks the second sabotage of French infrastructure. Coordinated fires on French rail lines had already thrown a spanner in the works ahead of the opening ceremony on Friday.

The fiber cables were severed in nine departments, including Ardeche, Aude, Bouches-du-Rhone, Drome, Herault, Vaucluse, Marne, Meuse, and Oise, as reported by the French Telecom Federation. SFR, one of the affected networks, revealed that its infrastructure was vandalised between the ungodly hours of 1 am and 3 am.

Teams are now scrambling to make repairs, though rerouting traffic might result in slower speeds.

 Other carriers, such as Iliad SA's Free and Netalis, also took to social media to lament their woes.

Netalis CEO Nicolas Guillaume assured that the company had swiftly moved traffic to backup networks early on Monday. Meanwhile, French cloud provider OVHcloud is also busy rerouting traffic after the incident, which had caused slower performance on connections between Europe and Asia Pacific.

Romain Bonenfant, head of the French Telecom Federation, took the opportunity to call for France to bolster criminal sanctions for vandalism on telecom infrastructure, equating it to vandalism on energy infrastructure.

"Telecom infrastructure, like the railways, covers kilometers across the whole territory -- you can't put surveillance on every part of it," he lamented in an interview.