Giant breakdown at Orange: the underside of an incident never seen since 2012

A dark day. The day after a major French network sound cut, Orange is still licking its wounds and looking for answers. On Wednesday, around 11 a.m., the mobile network of the leading telecoms operator began to show signs of weakness.

Quickly, millions of French people were unable to make calls, send messages or use the internet. On DownDetector, a participatory site where Internet users can report failures in access to certain digital services, the number of reports concerning Orange increased from 39 to 11,494 between 11:18 a.m. and 11:48 a.m., proof of the massive nature of the outage. A blackout not total, but national in scope, subscribers having been affected throughout the country.

“This incident is linked to an equipment failure at the level of a new mobile core network,” the operator indicated in the evening, ensuring around 9 p.m. that its network was operational again. Asked by Le Figaro to…