Nine hours without a signal

At 11:20 a.m. on Wednesday, the bars disappeared from the top of the screens. No calls, no texts, no 4G or 5G for part of the 21.6 million mobile customers of Orange and Sosh. At 11:50, Downdetector counted close to 12,000 reports. Bouygues Telecom and SFR, for their part, said they had seen nothing. It took until 8:30 p.m. for Orange to announce “a return to normal”.

The operator speaks of “a failure of a piece of equipement in our mobile core network”. Numerama goes further: the launch of a new 5G core network is said to have gone wrong, and millions of lines had to be resynchronised, first one by one, then in waves, with the equipment maker Nokia. 3G, meanwhile, was still standing, and those who knew how to switch off 4G on their phone could call their mother back.

« a failure of a piece of equipment in our mobile core network »Orange, statement on the evening of Wednesday 21 October

A brand-new core network that ran wild

It is Orange’s third nationwide outage this year, after January and June, and the longest in years. A goodwill gesture is expected on Thursday, as after the previous ones.

The same day, the prefectures were pulling their websites because of PHP (page 5). Two unrelated outages, one lesson: when the network goes down, who do you call to say so?