I am sat in our garden some 100 metres from our house in a spot where my smart phone barely receives 1bar of 4g coverage as at 7.12 am on 16th August our internet service was lost.
I was informed of this loss only after talking to Orange 3 times on the morning of the 16th and being told to switch off and on our live box, reset the box via the reset button and then a rdv made for an engineer to call at our house between 6 and 7 pm on Friday the 18th to resolve the problem that was ckearly rooted somewhere in our house!
By this time I knew they were lieing as what engineer would still be doing house calls on a Friday evening at holiday time in France?
All my conversations are recorded via SMS messages send from Orange and when I later received a message cancelling the engineer rdv followed by a message advising the loss of service was widespread did I know why the rdv was cancelled.
There was hope at this point as the loss of service sms message also informed that normal service would resume by the end of the day on 17th.
I woke bright and early on Friday 18th expecting to catch up on everything but of course, no internet.
A further call to orange that afternoon and I was told the problem had been fixed with now just a few lines to restore, lucky me being one of those few lines!
I was promised a phone call update today between 12 and 1pm so sat down the garden waiting. Orange rang me at 12.50 to say how sorry they were that our service would not be restored for at least 7 more days. By this time I had given up asking questions to which I knew would not be answered truthfully so asked what compensation I could expect for a service I was paying for but not receiving. I was told that this could not be discussed until the service was restored and I would receive an sms message from the engineer when normal service was resumed.
The last sms message following my conversation with orange today advises that they will call me in 7 days time to see if we have internet restored!
Before the service was lost we had 3 nights of storms and I religiously unplugged all internet equipment so as not to have any damage caused abd it seems to me that orange should have done the same.
I suspect that due to the holiday period orange simply do not have enough engineers working yet orange keep rolling out various messages from their excuse file.
Itâs only when you are deprived of the internet do you realise that life cannot run to the normal we now expect. Doctors, emergency services, banking, impots, forward planning are essential services all now on line but for us are now out of reach. Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Survive France are perhaps not essential but for me are part of my world, but not for now.
How many times in a day do you reach for your phone, tablet or laptop to do this or that? When you have an internet service you wonât have an answer but when you havenât then I can tell you, it is many many times.
Sorry for the rambling but had to vent my frustration somewhere because Orange wonât listen.
So sorry John. I know exactly what your frustrations are because this happened to us. Again, it was area-wide and it was days before we were reconnected. We also had to fight to get compensation - in the end I wrote to the CEO of Orange and our account was credited with over 100 euros.
Take care with the âat the endâ bit - when we were back online I phoned immediately to confirm I wanted compensation for the loss of the service, to be told I wouldnât get anything because I didnât contact them when it first happened. So I said how could I, when I had neither a landline, nor internet and we were a dead area for mobile phones? And I said anyway they must know when it went off because it was an area-wide issue. She was rude and uncooperative - hence my letter to the CEO.
I hope you are keeping a record of dates/times and not just on SF. Good luck with this.
The only upside of our current woes is that with the thermometer at 35 degrees and rising the tree that I am currently sat under is the coolest part of the house and garden.
Many thanks for your tips which I will take on board.
Have you used the online tester? https://tester-depanner-vos-services.orange.fr/?page=accueil
I know it does not help you with getting it fixed, but it usually updates with a new date when it will operational.
We are due to have fibre installed and as we have Orange we asked for a quote.
They told us they could not provide a service for us.
When our Mayor came to sign our Life Certificates, we mentioned this, only to find that a neighbouring house had had it fitted.
She also said she would contact Orange on our behalf.
Nothing as yet.
What a shower.
Just to give a good news story about OrangeâŠ
Iâm usually well informed about a possible local âhorageâ that is likely to fry our Livebox & unplug accordingly.
However, early last Friday morning we a had some major un-forecast lightning that caught us unprepared & we had no internet from a bit before 06.00, when there was a nearby strike.
I initially did not think that our fault was box related, as it booted up with all the right messages, until displaying a message saying that there was no sign of the réseau.
However, the online checker (accessible as we have good 4G coverage) reported that the Livebox was faulty & invited me to set up an exchange, which I did.
Slightly over 24 hours after that request a new Livebox turned up at my favourite point relais, with the old one being sent back in the packing that the new one arrived in.
Once home the Livebox happily connected & sorted itself out & sanity was restored to the house full of family guests who were getting twitchy about using their meagre UK roaming allowances.
In this instance Sosh (who are Orange by another name), did tell the truth.
Keep a copy. 
Donât want to depress you, but it took a month to get us back on line. It was over Christmas and the New Year, so obviously all the adults were on holiday and the kids were left in charge. I suspect itâs the same issue now - August, anyone with any authority/competence is on the beach.
The heatwave is due to subside later this week and our camping car is all ready for the off but too hot now.
Not depressing at all as when roaming we always get a good signal and can hotspot to all our devices.
We might even meet the orange technician on rhe beach!
keep screenshots of interim tests.
Iâve had more than one network lie to me that service was available on dates it wasnât.
I believe there is statutory compensation for electricity outages and guessing there might be for network outage as well. Quechoisir.org may have it, checking your contract may be worth it too.
My mimimun would be pro rata refund of days lost plus a penalty amount.
As itâs August Iâll also take a bet this is planned maintenance by Orange on a transmitter that theyâve actually taken down. Orange doesnât tell anyone ahead when they do this, and letâs not talk about customer service in France. Googling and rootling around on Orange site might find list of transmitters down for maintenance
https://suivi-des-incidents.orange.fr/infos-couverture-mobile
above might start you on the trail, there is a list of transmitters being maintained, with dates,somewhere on their website
I share your pain, although I am with Free. On the 24 July, when I was not there, a storm rendered me internetless. Only me; my neighbours are all still connected! After all this time, we are awaiting Orange to check the line they have responsibility for, without any idea when I may be reconnected. Not really a service at all.
Sadly friendsâ experiences on more than one occasion has shown that having Free alongside Orange is a dire scenario. One set of friends had no phone or internet for 10 weeks. Each company can blame the other. Thatâs why weâve always stayed 100% with Orange.
Has the 4g gone down as well? They normally offer you extra gb on your phone if 4g is still there, so you can connect your ipad etc to the phone as a hotspot. Unfortunately our 4g signal is hopeless.
Whenever we have an outage Orange offered to use our phones to create a wifi hot spot and some 200GB to cover the outage. Alternatively we also have a little box to get a 4G signal but to use this for wifi I have to get a sim card from the boutique.
Never had a problem with either and great service from the staff at the shop in St. Junien.
Perhaps a visit to your local shop is more productive than a call centre.
Many thanks for all your informative responses.
Struggling to reply to each one as still no service.
The link to list of masts out of order was very helpful and guess what, the one nearest to us is out of order!
I drove to the mast which sits on top of a water tower expecting to see a swarm of Orange engineers vans but nothing.
Once again sat at the bottom of the garden typing this from where I can get an intermittent 4g signal.
Orange have given us a 200 gb boost but that is useless when we cannot get a signal.
Our contract is 140go which gives us all we need and more if we continually hotspot for 4 weeks with pkenty to spare as we have done when in our camping car so another 200gb is useless. We were offered an air box but without a 4g signal that is useless tooand we would have to do a 100 kilometre round trip to collect one.
So we watch and wait to see if normal service is resumed today but I somehow doubt it.
When I moved to my house full time I had to get a new line installed, which had to be done by Orange as all the other providers just shrugged and said it would take them months, and couldnât even give a timeline. Signed up with Orange, they duly installed a new line, and then I went on for months and months, about 9 in total by the time the issue was finally resolved, but I persisted and did not let them off the hook. I had every call and engineerâs visit logged. Knew just about everyone in the Tunisian call centre. Every time the engineer came we always ended up having quite a laugh at the lack of Orangeâs capability to sort issues, as he kept being sent to look at the connection in my house and every time it was ok. So I also finally wrote to the Orange France CEO, recorded delivery, with the catalogue of issues and demanded a refund for the whole period where the internet was unstable. The internet worked, but not constantly, which was the great frustration. Soon after that I was contacted by someone from an âescalationâ customer services department and I was refunded the full 8 months. It was then another one month before they sussed out that there was an issue at the local exchange, which they duly fixed, and then I was also refunded that additional month. I switched to Orangeâs low cost offering Sosh as soon after as I could, and now couldnât be happier with the service. Only one issue reported since, which I think was after a storm. An engineer came out promptly to discover a line had broken in the road, which he fixed immediately! Persistence pays!
Iâve recently experienced a similar issue. We have a holiday home in Brittany and visited in late May during which we installed some Ring security cameras. A few days after returning to the U.K. we noticed that we were no longer receiving videos from France but not being there, we werenât sure whether we may have had a power cut or a problem with the Orange wifi. We arrived for our August trip and found we had no wifi so after doing the obvious attempts to fix, I called Orange to report. I was informed that the issue was outside our property and that the fault had occurred at 3am on the 30th of May (which tied in to when the videos stopped). We were told an engineer would come in 4 days. On the day nobody showed up but I was eventually told that an engineer had been and was unable to fix the issue but another team would come a week later. Given that would be 48 hours before our return to the U.K. it wasnât ideal to say the least but there was nothing we could do. The fault was eventually fixed without us being made aware until 24 hours after. My husband asked how it was fair for us to have paid 3 months charge when there was no service and was told there would be no compensation until the date we reported the fault! I find that totally unfair! I intend to complain to Orange (Iâm not sure where to start with that!) and consider moving to Sosh who I understand are a low cost provider (still using the Orange network) as I know we are paying more than we need to.
Essentially Sosh is still Orange but instead of phone support it is online, which I found far more efficient actually 
Not very useful now but, if you install the Orange app on your phone, you can check the state of your service remotely and report faults.
This thread might help you. For me, this worked. They refunded 100 euros.