Paris (AFP)
Telecom fiber optic cables were intentionally cut Tuesday in Ile-de-France, depriving tens of thousands of Orange subscribers of access to the telephone or the Internet, we learned on Wednesday from concordant sources, exact number of places and cuts not being known.
Orange mentioned two cuts concerning him, in Vitry and Ivry (Val-de-Marne). According to the telecom operator, "a few tens of thousands of subscribers" lost access to the telephone or the Internet on Wednesday morning.
By the end of the afternoon, "more than 50% of them" had returned to normal operation of their lines, according to the operator.
The customers concerned are located in Val-de-Marne and in Paris, said Orange Ile-de-France.
The company filed a complaint, and a judicial source confirmed that an investigation had been opened into the facts.
According to a judicial source, the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office has "kept itself informed of the situation" and remains "attentive to the phenomenon", without being in charge of the investigation.
Other companies have seen their activity disrupted, including the internet host and cloud provider (dematerialized IT) Scaleway, a subsidiary of Iliad / Free which relies on this cable to connect two of its data centers.
Arnaud de Bermingham, boss of Scaleway, tweeted in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday that he had identified at least "ten cut points in 5 municipalities" in eastern Paris, including Vitry and Ivry.
"The repairs will begin and probably last several days. Many operators affected in the sector, the night will be long," had already tweeted Tuesday afternoon from Bermingham.
"Services are gradually restarting for the customers of our two datacenters depending on the operators with whom they work," he added on Wednesday morning.
The incident also had an impact on websites such as Winamax, an online betting and poker site that remained inaccessible during the day on Tuesday.
The fiber optic cables that form the infrastructure of modern telecommunications networks are regularly cut accidentally during road works. But deliberate malicious acts on these devices are extremely rare.
According to a good expert on the file, the area where the cuts took place is one of the hotspots in the Paris region for telecom networks, with a large concentration of fiber optic communication routes.
The other areas include boulevard Voltaire in Paris and Plaine Saint-Denis northeast of the capital, where giant data centers have been installed or are under construction.
© 2020 AFP