“40% of the calls were routed and the quality of the rest of the calls was degraded” specifies Orange which announced a return to normal at 4:45 p.m.
The emergency numbers (15, 18, 112) were “severely disrupted” for at least an hour this Tuesday afternoon January 17, everywhere in France, announces Orange.
Su Twitter, the incumbent operator, which manages emergency numbers, then clarified that “the routing of emergency numbers has been operational again since 4:45 p.m.”. At the end of the afternoon, the Ministry of the Interior for its part specified that “twenty departments” were concerned: Hautes-Pyrénées, Haute-Vienne, Haute-Savoie, Landes, Drôme , Seine-Maritime, Loire, Lot-et-Garonne, Saône-et-Loire, Var, Nièvre, Seine-et-Marne, Loire-Atlantique, Sarthe, Meuse, Orne , Eure-et-Loir, Vienne and Deux-Sèvres.
Contacted by BFMTV, Orange specifies that “for 1 hour, 40% of calls were routed and the quality of the rest of the calls was degraded.”
Second national outage in two years
Last year, Orange had already experienced a breakdown of emergency numbers over a longer period. The numbers dedicated to the Samu (15), to the police (17), were victims of technical problems on June 2 between 6 p.m. and midnight, the time at which they were restored.
This time, the breakdown seems to have been quickly circumscribed by Orange while several departments – including Nièvre, Les Landes or even Seine-et-Marne – had alerted to these routing problems. This Tuesday afternoon, Orange was unable to explain the failure.
