Science & Technology
Major Orange and Sosh network outage hits France for hours
Orange's mobile network, including its Sosh subsidiary, went down for nearly nine hours on October 21, affecting millions of subscribers across France.
On the morning of Wednesday, October 21, 2026, a major outage struck Orange's entire mobile network in France, including customers of Sosh, the operator's subsidiary. Numerous users reported a complete loss of signal, leaving them unable to make calls, send messages or access mobile data. Orange confirmed the disruption but initially provided no explanation for the fault.
According to Orange, the incident stemmed from a failure of equipment in the core mobile network. According to Numerama, the issue may have been triggered by the deployment of a new 5G core network. However, Orange acknowledged that despite hours of investigation by its technical teams, it had not yet fully understood what caused the problem.
The service interruption lasted from 11:20 a.m. to approximately 8:30 p.m. the same day. After several hours of work, Orange deployed a temporary solution to resynchronise its subscribers and restore service. Upon restoration, the operator said its technical teams would continue monitoring the network to ensure stability and service quality in the following hours.
When contacted by media, Bouygues Telecom and SFR reported no incidents on their own networks during this period, confirming that the outage was limited to Orange's infrastructure.
To compensate affected subscribers, Orange announced it would double their mobile data allowance for one month.