Failure of emergency numbers: Orange is carrying out an internal investigation

The time has come for investigations to determine the real causes of the outage that occurred on Wednesday evening on emergency calls. Between 4:45 p.m. and midnight, numbers 15, 17,18 were very strongly disturbed in several departments of the metropolis and the overseas departments. An incident on the Orange network which coordinates all calls to emergency numbers is the cause of this massive outage. Today, the CEO of the operator, Stéphane Richard “launched an in-depth internal investigation which he entrusted to the Group’s General Inspectorate,” said a press release.

He adds, that “it will have to carry out the necessary investigations to identify the precise causes of this incident and to issue recommendations to draw all the necessary lessons. The conclusions are expected within 7 days. “. In various interviews, the boss of Orange explained that the problem probably came from a “software failure in critical network equipment” and to supplement that it is “an extremely rare technical problem”. On the other hand, he rules out any hypothesis of a cyberattack, although the Minister of the Interior is not excluded from this track. Likewise, he considers a maintenance error on the routers unlikely.

An external audit led by the government and Stéphane Richard in the hot seat

In parallel with the internal investigation, Orange will also undergo an external audit commissioned by the government to determine “the causes and consequences of this incident, as well as the methods of reporting information”. The services of the Ministry of the Interior, the Economy, Arcep and also ANSSI will be mobilized for this audit. The latter will have to answer several questions: Why did maintenance operations take place in the middle of the day and not at night? Are there redundancy systems and why have they not tripped? Etc.

Still many questions and a human toll which to date reports 4 alleged victims including a 2 year old child. These “serious and unacceptable” dysfunctions are beginning to have political repercussions. Thus, Mounir Mahjoubi, former secretary of state for digital, believes at the microphone of Sud Radio that “we should not look only at the technical problem, but also the organization of Orange” and to target the responsibility of Stéphane Richard . The latter is clearly in the hot seat one year from the end of his mandate. As trouble never comes alone, a 3-year prison sentence, 2 of which was suspended, was requested by the public prosecutor in the Bernard Tapie and Crédit Lyonnais case. At the time, he was chief of staff to the Minister of the Economy Christine Lagarde and he is being prosecuted for complicity in the embezzlement of public funds.