In France, on Wednesday evenings and at night, it was very difficult for several hours to call firefighters, police or rescuers. The outage was due to a technical error on the part of Orange. The government and the operator ruled out a hacker attack.
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The Crisis Intergovernmental Unit, chaired by Prime Minister Jean Castex, has been operating since Wednesday until today. All hotlines are available again and the situation is under control, the prime minister said this morning. According to the Minister of the Interior, the control of the emergency system will be strengthened for as long as necessary.
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The audit of the “security and system integrity check” of the Orange operator will be carried out by the National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI), the results will be available in about two weeks. According to AFP, Orange wants to cooperate in the audit. Immediately after finding out about the defect, the company’s management apologized to all the victims and started its own internal investigation into the causes of the outage. The results should be known next Friday.
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To date, five deaths are known, contributed to the slow response or unavailability of the emergency services. They occurred in the departments of Morbihan, Haute-Saône, Bouches-du-Rhône, Vendée and the island of Réunion. A man with acute heart problems, whose loved ones did not call the emergency line, eventually had to be taken on his own to the hospital in Vannes, where he died. The young child died Thursday morning after his mother did not call for help. In all five cases, hospitals or authorities requested death investigations. The Association of Emergency Physicians in France (AMUF) requested the establishment of a parliamentary commission of inquiry.
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