In case you haven’t observed, youngsters nowadays simply do not know learn how to reasonable their screen time. So, in a determined bid to get his kids offline, some man in France apparently blitzed his whole city’s web connection—accidentally, that’s. He now faces as much as six months in jail for the outage.

A report from the outlet France Bleu says the unnamed dad tried to make use of a multi-wave band jammer to quickly reduce off the web connection at his residence within the city of Messanges. Jammers, that are unlawful in France (and in addition in the U.S.), work by interfering with telecommunication indicators, thus stifling connections. Despite their illegality, folks nonetheless get arrested for utilizing them, just about all the time.

In this case, the dad in query deployed the machine within the hopes of prying his social-media-addicted kids away from the grips of their units. When later questioned by a authorities official, the person apparently admitted that he solely wished to chop off the connectivity to his home at night time, between the hours of midnight and three a.m.—most likely so his youngsters would put the telephones down and simply go to mattress already.

Unfortunately for the padre, the jamming machine was highly effective sufficient to chop connectivity not simply to his personal residence however, unbeknownst to him, to these of many, many others within the surrounding space. His neighbors ultimately began reporting their outages, after which the federal government was pressured to research. The outlet stories:

He was considering of depriving his solely kids of the web and didn’t think about that the wave jammer he was utilizing would disrupt telecommunications in an space spanning two municipalities. An investigation by the National Frequency Agency established his duty and authorized proceedings had been initiated.

The man now faces as much as six months in jail and a wonderful of 30,000 euros. Ouch. There’s gotta be a neater method to unplug than this, of us.