Giant outage at Orange: what compensation for the millions of affected customers?

An incident never seen at Orange since 2012. On Wednesday October 21, several million of the operator's customers were unable to make calls, send messages or use the internet for more than nine hours, due to a major outage of its mobile network. In an exclusive interview with Le Figaro on Friday, the general director of Orange France, Jérôme Hénique, once again wanted to “present on behalf of Orange (its) apologies for this incident”. But this is not enough for many subscribers, who are demanding action from the operator for the inconvenience caused.

They were, at least in part, heard: the day after the outage, the leading national telecoms operator promised compensation, in this case a doubling of the data envelope included in the package of affected customers. This was confirmed by Jérôme Hénique on Friday in our columns. “We wanted a simple and automatic system, without any action on their part: doubling their data volume for one month,” he confirmed, specifying that “this measure concerns general public customers, but also professionals and businesses.” “Affected customers were informed by SMS,” he added.

During the previous mega-outage at Orange, in July 2012, the company had, depending on the plans, offered 1 gigabyte of data or a day of unlimited calls and SMS. In the case of this week's incident, Orange is not planning more than the doubling of the data envelope - which may prove useless for customers whose plan already provides for a large amount of data. “At this stage, we are not planning any other general measure, except specific contractual provisions for certain corporate clients,” indicated Jérôme Hénique.

Compensation awarded after claims

However, on social networks, some Internet users claim to have managed to obtain up to 10 euros off their next bill, by filing a complaint with Orange or Sosh - Orange's no-obligation brand. “There is also a co-financial gesture that must be requested! 10 euros on my next bill,” reported a subscriber on the social network X. “They offered me €5 on my €15.99 subscription,” wrote another.