Mobile network SFR confirms major outage in large French cities

Mobile users on French network SFR suffered connection problems yesterday as the company confirmed a breakdown in several major towns.

SFR confirmed on October 26 that there had been “an incident” affecting its mobile network in “several large towns”, after many users complained that they had no internet access, and some said they had lost all connection completely.

Major reports of a lack of service began on the website DownDetector – which enables users to report when websites or services ‘go down’ – from 14:00 and large numbers were received especially in the following hour. The issue is still not confirmed as having been fully resolved.

Most reports came from Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Nantes, Lille, Reims and Nice.

On its Twitter account, SFR said: “An incident is currently underway on the SFR mobile network. Our technical teams are on-site to solve this problem and allow you to recover your services.”

Later, a spokesperson for the Altice group, parent company of SFR, said that the cause of the outage was as-yet unknown, but had affected the 4G network. They added that the company was working to restore connectivity as soon as possible.

It comes after a major outage was reported on September 19 for SFR, and also the Orange network. Mobile customers had no connection for almost three hours.

Similarly, last June, emergency numbers in France went down due to a ‘software bug’ on old computer equipment. Inquiries are now underway into what happened, after five people were found to have died as a direct result of the drop in service.

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