FAILURE AMBER. After several hours of outage on its network, Orange indicated on Tuesday evening, May 30, 2023, that it had resolved the bug which prevented many customers from contacting, among other things, the emergency services.
[Updated May 30, 2023 10:16 p.m.] “Back to normal.” After several hours of breakdown, the telephone operator Orange announced the good news at 9:30 p.m. on Twitter. “Since 8:30 p.m., all Orange services have been functional again,” he said. Orange also indicated that it would remain under vigilance and once again apologized for the inconvenience caused. However, the reason for the outage was not specified. The bug, which affected the Orange network on Tuesday May 30, 2023, started in the middle of the afternoon. After a peak in outage reports at Orange, on the Downdetector site, around 5 p.m., their number had decreased considerably during the evening without the situation being completely restored.
Around 7 p.m., the telephone operator still indicated on Twitter that “calls via the Orange mobile network” were still “disturbed”. And to clarify: “Internet services on mobile and landline calls are functional. If necessary, we invite customers to repeat calls and prefer 112 for any call to emergency services.” Earlier in the day, around 5 p.m., the operator had already spoken about the breakdown, indicating that “the teams [were] fully mobilized to restore services and present[ai]ent their apologies for the inconvenience caused”.
While multiple reports were made in the afternoon of Tuesday by the operator’s customers, the company confirmed a major bug on its mobile network at the end of the afternoon. A first message was posted at 5:15 p.m. on the Orange France Twitter account and confirms a breakdown affecting telephone calls on the mobile network. Internet connections are not affected, which means that Orange customers can surf the Internet, send emails or use instant messaging and video networks such as WhatsApp or FaceTime.
This is not the first major outage experienced by Orange in 2023. Last January, a controversy erupted over an outage that specifically affected emergency numbers. Calls to emergency service numbers such as 15 for the Samu, 18 for the fire brigade or 112 for the emergency number for the emergency services had been severely disrupted by a breakdown affecting a dozen departments, according to the Ministry of Interior. A similar outage took place in early summer 2021 and led to the opening of an internal investigation, but also to an audit by the state.
