French phone operator SFR was hit by a countrywide network outage for several hours on Thursday, as hundreds of users complained via the Internet about their mobile phones being unable to make or receive calls, text messages and sometimes emails, reports reports The Wall Street Journal.
Around four million customers were experiencing problems from around 0700 GMT Thursday morning, mostly those on the operator's fourth-generation network and some third-generation network clients, a spokesman for SFR said. SFR, which media conglomerate Vivendi recently agreed to sell to cable operator Numericable Group, has a total of around 21 million customers.
The incident was caused by the breakdown of a 'home location register,' a central database recently put in place by equipment-maker Alcatel-Lucent that allows the network to localize customers, the spokesman said.
The service was back up for the majority of customers by 1250 GMT, SFR said on its customer forum. Alcatel-Lucent teams worked with SFR teams to restore the outage, a spokeswoman for Alcatel said.
SFR customers from across the country had been complaining on the user forum, Twitter and Facebook about being unable to make or receive calls, text messages and sometimes email, in places including Paris, Nice, Dijon and Normandy.
The issue appears to be less dramatic than the last major mobile network crash in France. In July 2012, the network operator Orange SA was down for more than 12 hours, leaving tens of millions of people unable to send or receive mobile calls, text messages and emails.
Read more of this report from The Wall Street Journal.