The conclusions of the audit announced by the Interior on Friday June 4 fell.

The operator Orange has shown "insufficient" reactivity during the malfunction of the emergency numbers system in France which occurred at the beginning of June, points out this Thursday the report commissioned by the government.

"It is clear (...) that there have been shortcomings on the part of the company," noted Cédric O, Secretary of State for Digital, during a briefing.

Wednesday, June 2, between 4:45 p.m. and midnight, nearly 12,000 calls had not been sent, according to an internal survey of the group.

Orange had asserted that this crisis, to which six deaths are potentially linked, was due to a software "bug", a track confirmed by the report led by the French public IT security agency (Anssi).

A lively political debate

The blackout had provoked strong political reactions and renewed the debate on the system of emergency numbers, of which some players want the merger, while the authorities had had to set up alternative 10-digit numbers to reach the emergency services.

The incumbent operator is criticized in this report for having first of all poorly prepared for his technical intervention that caused the bug, then reacted too slowly.

“Orange took nearly an hour to realize that the outage affected the emergency services in particular, two hours to inform the authorities and nearly three hours to put in place an appropriate system.

This is due to several internal dysfunctions at Orange, ”notes the document consulted by AFP.

Different avenues for advanced improvement

In order to prevent such a situation from happening again, various avenues are proposed to the government.

This involves, for example, setting up an alert escalation system and technical supervision specific to emergency numbers among operators, or systematically carrying out tests before any technical intervention on critical equipment.

The government therefore plans to modify the regulatory framework by the end of the year in order to strengthen the obligations of result concerning the routing of emergency calls.

It will also, in the coming days, seize the telecoms regulator, so that it appreciates the respect by Orange of its regulatory obligations.

A crisis exercise must also be carried out within six months.

Orange had drawn up a first list of recommendations at the end of its internal investigation, such as the objective of "reducing from two hours to thirty minutes maximum" the time taken to trigger a crisis unit, in such a situation.

Their implementation must be verified, as well as the taking into account of those of the report published on Thursday, claim the authors of the latter.

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  • Emergency room

  • Orange

  • Breakdown

  • Telephony

  • Investigation

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