Orange said on Wednesday evening that its mobile network in France was working again: calls, SMS and data, for consumer and business customers. The nationwide outage had begun in the morning. Restoration is a statement. It is not a detailed public technical cause, and it is not confirmation that every local incident has gone.

News.ro, via AFP, quotes the operator: the incident is tied to the failure of a piece of equipment in the mobile-network core. At the end of June Orange had 21.6 million customers in France. On Downdetector, reports peaked at more than 12,000 at 11:50 local time. Technical teams, the statement says, remain on watch “in the hours ahead.”

Zonebourse carried the same official text, with apologies for the inconvenience. Clubic, independent of News.ro, notes that the Sosh brand was hit too and that at 19:00 the operator had spoken only of a “major technical incident,” with no origin, while saying emergency calls were unaffected. RTL set aside a hacking track. A speculation about a 5G migration, put out by a researcher, is not taken up by Orange.

RTL separated the outage from another alert the same day: public sites taken down as a precaution after PHP vulnerabilities, at Anssi’s request. Two files. Not the same incident.

A restoration announced in the evening does not say how long it lasted for each subscriber. Nor that the masts were the problem: the core is another layer from the towers. Wi-Fi, RTL reported during the day, was working. That does not stand in for a technical report.

Source consulted: Orange announces the restoration of the mobile network in France after a major outage — News.ro.

Image: Orange S.A. headquarters at Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris, 13 October 2023, BobVillars, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The building, not Wednesday’s outage.

Sources consulted: Restoration of Orange France’s mobile network — Zonebourse / Orange statement.