Orange, the largest telecoms operator in France, lost much of its mobile network on Wednesday.
From about 11:20 CEST, customers nationwide could not make calls, send texts or use mobile data, and by early afternoon the company had not named a cause.
An Orange spokesperson told Reuters that the fault was causing major problems for customers nationwide. Technical teams were working to identify the cause and restore service, the spokesperson said. Orange also acknowledged the problem in a French post on X.
Bonjour, vous pouvez rencontrer actuellement des perturbations sur le réseau mobile Orange.
Nos équipes sont pleinement mobilisées pour rétablir le réseau dans les meilleurs délais.
Veuillez nous excuser pour la gêne occasionnée.— Orange France (@Orange_France) October 21, 2026
“Our teams are fully mobilised to restore the network as quickly as possible,” the company wrote.
The outage tracker Downdetector recorded about 12,000 reports at 12:00 CEST, compared with around nine on a normal day.
Users reported problems in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux and Strasbourg, according to Sortiraparis. Sosh, the low-cost brand that runs on Orange’s network, was hit too, as were some 5G home internet boxes that depend on it. Most fibre lines kept working, so many people could still call and message over Wi-Fi.
Orange’s network status page wouldn’t load during the outage, and some phones regained signal at around 12:20 CEST, though coverage stayed patchy.
Whether emergency numbers were affected was still unclear. Sortiraparis told people without signal to dial 112, the European emergency number, which can connect through another operator’s network.
Orange’s mobile network has failed at least twice before this year. A fault on January 30 lasted about seven and a half hours, according to Sortiraparis, and another followed on June 29.
In June 2021, a fault at the company cut access to emergency numbers across France for several hours, prompting an apology from Orange.
The fault came a day after a power failure at a Google Cloud data centre in London disrupted banking apps across Europe, though no source has linked the two. Orange had not given a time for full service to return when this article was published.