French government blames Orange’s slow crisis management of its network outage

PARIS: Orange, France’s biggest telecoms firm, failed to swiftly alert the country’s authorities about the extent of the network outage that affected calls to emergency services for several hours last month, according to a government report released on Thursday.

The network outage put the state-controlled company and its boss Stephane Richard under the spotlight, as thousands of calls nationwide could not go through to emergency services on June 2, putting the lives of some people at risk.

“It’s clear from the report that there were shortcomings on the part of the company,” France’s minister for digital affairs Cedric O told reporters in a call, stressing that Orange’s handling of the crisis could have been more efficient.