In circumstance you have not discovered, youngsters these times just do not know how to average their display screen time. So, in a desperate bid to get his small children offline, some guy in France apparently blitzed his full town’s net connection—by incident, that is. He now faces up to six months in jail for the outage.

A report from the outlet France Bleu suggests the unnamed dad tried using to use a multi-wave band jammer to temporarily slice off the net connection at his home in the town of Messanges. Jammers, which are illegal in France (and also in the U.S.), operate by interfering with telecommunication alerts, hence stifling connections. In spite of their illegality, people still get arrested for using them, pretty much all the time.

In this scenario, the dad in issue deployed the device in the hopes of prying his social-media-addicted young children absent from the grips of their products. When later on questioned by a federal government formal, the person seemingly admitted that he only wished to slash off the connectivity to his residence at night time, amongst the hours of midnight and 3 a.m.—probably so his kids would put the phones down and just go to bed presently.

Sad to say for the padre, the jamming product was effective sufficient to lower connectivity not just to his possess home but, unbeknownst to him, to those of several, numerous some others in the bordering spot. His neighbors sooner or later begun reporting their outages, after which the authorities was compelled to investigate. The outlet reports:

He was imagining of depriving his only kids of the world-wide-web and did not visualize that the wave jammer he was making use of would disrupt telecommunications in an region spanning two municipalities. An investigation by the Nationwide Frequency Company set up his responsibility and authorized proceedings were initiated.

The person now faces up to six months in jail and a good of 30,000 euros. Ouch. There’s gotta be an less difficult way to unplug than this, individuals.