Orange mobile network outage cuts calls and data across France

Nationwide outage on Wednesday

Orange's mobile network across France failed on Wednesday, 21 October, leaving many customers unable to make calls, send text messages or use mobile data. The operator, which counted about 21.6 million mobile customers in France at the end of June 2026, told AFP that the incident affected its network at national level and that its origin still had to be identified. Sosh, the low-cost brand that runs on Orange's network, was affected too, as were some 5G home internet boxes that depend on the mobile network. Users in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux and Strasbourg reported problems. Most fibre lines stayed up, which left some people able to call and message over Wi-Fi.

Timeline of the outage

Trouble began around 11:20 CEST, when customers nationwide reported they could not make calls, send texts or use mobile data. Downdetector reports peaked at 11:50, with nearly 12,000 submitted, and the tracker still showed about 12,000 at 12:00. Orange's network status page did not load during the outage, and some phones regained signal around 12:20, although coverage remained patchy. While the outage was still under way, Orange had not given a time for full service to return. The operator said in the evening that it had fixed the fault and that calls, SMS and mobile services were working again for individual and business customers. Its teams kept monitoring the network in the hours that followed to keep service stable.

Orange's account and the cause

Orange confirmed the problem on X and in a statement to AFP, which quoted the company as saying:

Orange confirms an incident affecting its mobile network at the national level.

The company added that the incident was strongly disrupting calls, texts and mobile use for part of its customers, and that its teams were working to establish what had gone wrong.

This incident is strongly disrupting calls, SMS and mobile usage for part of its customers.

Later, Orange said the fault involved equipment at the centre of its mobile network and was unrelated to the critical PHP programming language vulnerabilities that caused separate disruptions worldwide the same day. An Orange spokesperson told Reuters that the fault was causing significant problems for customers nationwide. A power failure at a Google Cloud data centre in London disrupted banking apps across Europe on 20 October, but no source has linked it to the Orange fault.

Emergency numbers and earlier failures

It remained unclear whether emergency numbers were affected. Local guidance told people without signal to dial 112, the European emergency number, which can connect through another operator's network. Orange's mobile network had already failed at least twice this year, on 30 January and on 29 June. The January fault lasted about seven and a half hours. In June 2021, a fault cut access to emergency numbers across France for several hours, and Orange apologised.