In the south-east of Oise, more than 10,000 households without internet after an act of vandalism
Courrier Picard/France3, May 23, 2025
During the night of May 22 to 23, a major service outage affected the south-east of the Oise region, depriving more than 10,000 homes and businesses of internet, fixed telephony and television, and disrupting the mobile network.
According to Orange, the incident took place between midnight and 1am. The perpetrators opened underground access hatches and vandalized the cables. However, the cables were not stolen. In the process, they cut the optical fibers, causing the major outage. Around a hundred communes were affected, notably in the Crépy-en-Valois area and in the Compiégnois region, around Jonquières.
“Our first alarms were activated during the night, between midnight and 1 a.m., and enabled us to see that there was a damaged fiber in the area,” explains Gautier Bezeau, press officer for Orange Hauts-de-France.
These alarms are triggered automatically when a large number of subscribers are cut off. However, they do not indicate the precise location of the incident. At around 6 a.m., the operator’s teams had to investigate. Our teams were dispatched in the early hours of the morning to detect the outage,” adds Gautier Bezeau. The fiber optic network served over 10,000 homes and businesses in the département, with Crépy-en-Valois being the largest population center, but in all, around a hundred communes were affected.”
The fiber network is organized rather like a blood system, with arteries made up of cables carrying large data flows to serve an entire territory. They then branch off, like blood vessels, into a smaller network that irrigates the communes before reaching individual customers.
One of these transport cables was severed during the night, which explains the extent of the Internet outage. Although the mobile network did not completely cease to function, some cell towers were out of service. Thanks to the network’s meshing, other cell towers were able to partially compensate. Orange points out that it has been working for several years with the prefecture and gendarmerie platoons to combat malicious acts. “Orange cannot monitor the public domain itself. That’s why we work with the police to help with investigations,” says Gautier Bezeau.
via: sansnom translated by Act for freedom now!