AGI – There is also a 28-month-old child among at least 4 people who died in France due to lack of assistance following the total blockade, which lasted from 18:00 to midnight on Wednesday 3 June, of the emergency numbers service in France .
“It is too early to take stock, but of course we are very worried,” the French president told reporters. Emmanuel Macron.
Telephone operator Orange has presented its apologies for what it called a “very rare” event and has excluded for the moment that the failure may have been the consequence of a cyber attack.
The little boy died in his home in the Vendée, announced the local prefect, who asked for an administrative investigation to be opened. The other victims known so far are a 63-year-old man who died in Vannes after calling an ambulance in vain for a heart attack and two other people who died of cardiovascular problems in the overseas department of the island of Reunion.
A criminal investigation has been opened on the death of the elderly man, while there are not yet sufficient elements to establish with total certainty that the two deaths on the Indian Ocean island are attributable to a delay in rescue operations, although this is the most likely hypothesis.
The failure of the equipment responsible for routing calls yesterday greatly hampered the reach of emergency numbers, making it difficult to access services across the country.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin hurried back to France from a visit to Tunisia with Prime Minister Jean Castex and called the blackout “serious and unacceptable”.
Orange’s managing director, Stephane Richard, presented “his heartfelt apologies to those who have been hit in the last few hours”, after being summoned this morning by the interior minister.
“The most likely cause” of the outage, the manager explained, “is a software failure in critical network equipment.” Previously the company had talked about a malfunction of the routers.
An inter-ministerial crisis unit will meet on Friday at 07:30 to take stock of what has happened. Orange has assured that the service is back to normal but the employee unions have stated that the telephone operator’s networks are still “weak”.
According to the National Federation of Firefighters of France, the incident shows the need to create a single number for emergencies, as requested for some time. The National Assembly today approved at first reading a bill that establishes it and which must now be passed by the Senate.
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