A major outage in the Orange network was dealt with overnight from Wednesday 2 to Thursday 3 June after severely disrupting emergency numbers. Since midnight, “The situation is clearly improving. The service works, but some difficulties persist ”, informed the operator to World Thursday morning. “The network is under surveillance with increased vigilance, especially during peak call times. The teams remain mobilized and the situation should return completely to normal within the next few hours. “
SAMU, firefighters, police …: this failure of equipment responsible for routing calls massively disrupted access to emergency numbers and fixed lines Wednesday between 6 pm and midnight. Many rescue services were difficult to reach across France, prompting many questions about the human consequences.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérard Darmanin, rushed back from Tunis during the night, spoke of “Serious and unacceptable malfunctions” during a crisis meeting Thursday morning devoted to the consequences of the incident.
?In #DIRECT | @GDarmanin press conference devoted to disruptions to emergency numbers https://t.co/7D4vHV9tyV
What happened
As of 6 p.m. Wednesday, massive malfunctions were reported across the country, causing major difficulties for the emergency services. “It must have been around 6 pm and all the SAMUs started alerting the call centers of problems. People were unable to access the service, calls were not arriving, others were cutting themselves off in the middle of a conversation, testified François Braun, president of the SAMU-Urgences de France union and emergency doctor. Very quickly, we did a little tour of France and we saw that almost all the departments were affected. “
The incident significantly affects “Partial but significant the reception of emergency calls 15/17/18/112 throughout the national territory”, confirmed, in a press release, the Ministry of the Interior, announcing the establishment of a list of provisional numbers in each department. Civil security, for its part, asked users not to overload the lines and to only call in an emergency. Some prefectures, such as those of the Dordogne and the Creuse, have advised to go to permanence: barracks, gendarmerie, police station, hospitals.
Orange announced Thursday morning that the network had been restored since midnight, but remained under surveillance. “Our fellow citizens must now return to the emergency numbers on the 18th, 17th, 15th, and if they do not succeed, use the bypass numbers that we are keeping at least this morning”, explained Mr. Darmanin during a press conference Thursday morning. “We will make an update at noon to see if we put an end to these bypass numbers. “
Human consequences still unknown
During this press briefing, the Minister of the Interior linked the death of an inhabitant of Morbihan with a ” heart disease ” to failure. This person would have died for lack of “Was able to reach the emergency services in time”, according to him.
The Minister added that ” of them other cardiovascular accidents’ had taken place in Reunion, “But I can not say if the time [avant l’arrivée des secours] was particularly long and if it is attributable to this emergency number ”. “What is certain is that the people testified that they tried to call several times and that they did not succeed immediately in obtaining operators”, he insisted.
From Wednesday evening, the incident raised many questions about the human consequences. ” What worries us is that people are calling for cardiac arrests, accidents. (…) We need to be able to respond as quickly as possible. There is a real problem of endangering others ”, particularly worried on BFM-TV Patrick Pelloux, the president of the Association of emergency physicians of France (AMUF).
“We do not know what consequences this failure will have, it is still too early to say”, declared François Braun, president of the SAMU-Urgences de France union, while reporting that, traditionally, “There is a peak in calls in the evening around 7 pm”. The SAMU receives a call every second at the national level.
Thursday morning, Orange said it was unable, for the time being, to quantify the number of customers concerned. “Not all departments have been affected in the same way. And in the affected departments, calls could go through randomly ”, specified at World a spokesperson.
At the origin of the failure
Investigations are underway within Orange, which is responsible for ensuring the distribution and continuity of emergency numbers, to determine the origin of the failure. If the group does not justify the failure by a cyberattack, “Nothing is ruled out at this time”, said Mr. Darmanin.
Orange CEO Stéphane Richard was summoned at 9 a.m. Thursday to the interior ministry to provide clarifications to the government. “At the request of the Prime Minister, an external audit will be carried out on the origins of the failure and the dysfunctions in the reporting of information”, also said Cédric O, secretary of state for digital, during the press conference in Beauvau.
“Sometimes there are occasional breakdowns, but we have never experienced one of this magnitude”, we explain at the operator’s headquarters. He reports that the failure is the result of “Technical incident on router type equipment which carries traffic”. But “We do not yet know if this is a problem with the equipment itself or with its configuration”, he specifies. During the night, the equipment was reconfigured, without any material intervention.
“It is not a problem of human resources. It is a known concern, voice over IP technology is more fragile, and this concerns all operators. We have systems that are more and more efficient, but more fragile. And failures on these technologies are more difficult to detect ”, explains Stéphane Crozier, president of the CFE-CGC Orange union. And to add: “On these special issues, we make three technologies coexist [mobile, traditionnel et voix sur IP]. You increase the complexity on something that must be solid. “
“We must understand the causes of the incident, because Orange has an obligation of results and not of resources, declared Thursday morning Camille Chaize, spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior, on BFM-TV. I am not saying that there is a fault, but we will have to understand the process, these palliative systems. Perhaps there are a number of things to review in order to modernize, perhaps this is the opportunity to review the emergency numbers system to make it simpler and more readable for the general public. . “
Bouygues Telecom and Altice, the parent company of SFR, also reported disruptions. A computer failure affected the Belgian operator Proximus at the beginning of January, disrupting emergency numbers in Belgium overnight.