Orange network outage cuts off 21.6 million customers across France

A major outage on Orange's mobile network cut off calls, text messages and data for customers across France for most of Wednesday, affecting the operator's 21.6 million mobile customers, Libertatea reported, citing Le Figaro and Selectra.

The disruption began mid-morning, with user reports on the outage-tracking site Downdetector climbing from about 6 shortly after 11am to almost 3,000 by midday and roughly 12,000 at its peak, La Dépêche du Midi and Libertatea reported. Orange confirmed "an incident affecting its mobile network at national level" that was "strongly disrupting calls, texts and mobile usage," the company said, according to Actu.fr and La Dépêche du Midi.

The outage also affected the Sosh brand, which runs on Orange's network, Libertatea reported. The Calvados prefecture warned residents that emergency numbers could be hard to reach, including the 15 ambulance line, the 17 police line and the 18 fire line, and advised people to try the European emergency number 112 from another network or a landline instead, Actu.fr reported.

Several prefecture websites were separately affected by maintenance linked to a security flaw unrelated to the Orange outage, Actu.fr reported. The outage was not connected to separate global disruptions reported the same day over vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, Orange said, according to Libertatea.

Orange said the problem was due to equipment failure at the core of its mobile network, Libertatea reported. A telecoms analyst, Benjamin Gervais of comparison site Zone ADSL, said it was too early to know the precise cause but that it could be a core-network problem, which tends to take longer to fix, Actu.fr reported.

The operator restored calls, texts and data for individual and business customers by Wednesday evening, Orange said in a statement. Orange typically has one or two such outages a year, with the previous one in June, Gervais told Actu.fr.