SFR outage: the operator compensates its subscribers with a big gift

If you're an SFR customer, you may have received a text message this Wednesday morning. It details the upcoming compensation: "Dear customer, following the incident that occurred this Monday, we would like to apologize and offer you 100 GB to thank you for your patience." The message also confirms that another text message will be sent within the next few days to inform you of the activation of the 100 GB in question.

Although it wasn't required to do so, SFR is being a good sport and has decided to give its subscribers affected by the outage a nice surprise. The operator will, in the coming days, distribute an additional 100 GB of data for free. The icing on the cake: you don't need to do anything! If you're affected, you'll receive the 100 GB directly within a few days.

The SFR outage has finally come to an end. While many users thought it would be a brief outage, it still lasted nearly 12 hours. An exceptionally long time for a mobile operator outage.

Here's a particularly funny fact revealed by L'Est Républicain : while France was being hit hard by the SFR outage, some customers tried to use the after-sales service on the official website to get more information on the subject. This is notably the case of Elise, a subscriber to the operator near Nancy, who used the SFR chatbot to find out if her line had a problem. The site's robot then put her on hold for... 46,560,000 minutes, the equivalent of 88 and a half years! Explaining that this time was far too long, the assistant went so far as to reply "I'm fine, thank you!"

Most other operators were not affected by the SFR outage. Major players in the market, such as Orange, Free, and Bouygues Telecom, reported no network issues during the day on June 16.

SFR, however, offers its mobile and landline network to other virtual mobile network operators (more commonly known as MVNOs). It is therefore possible that you were affected by the SFR outage if you are a customer of one of the following operators: RED by SFR, La Poste Mobile, Coriolis, Réglo Mobile, Prixtel, Syma Mobile, YouPrice.

While the conditions for obtaining a refund from SFR are strict, the waiting time before compensation is also a factor to consider. Once your refund request has been sent to the operator, the latter has approximately one month to respond positively (or negatively) to your request. The time taken to obtain your compensation may, however, vary depending on the nature of the compensation (free month, partial refund of your offer, etc.).

To find out if an outage is still ongoing, the best way is to visit the DownDetector website. The website operates on a participatory basis, allowing members to report when they experience outages with multiple services. When multiple complaints are activated at once, the gauge for the service in question increases, which generally means that an outage is in progress. This is particularly what happened on Monday, June 16, when a peak in activity was observed around 12 p.m.

As we indicated in our article, a refund from SFR is possible under certain conditions. Indeed, the operator's services must be inaccessible for 48 cumulative or consecutive hours to be eligible for a refund.

However, since a regulation from November 2024, it is possible to demand compensation from your operator if you experience an outage lasting more than 8 hours. The amounts to be claimed are minimal, however: expect to pay around €1 for the 8 hours of outage, then €1.50 for each additional day. To do this, you will need to contact SFR and attach all documents likely to prove the duration of the outage and its impact on your day.

Several hours after the outage was resolved, SFR is providing more information about the situation. As more and more customers begin to regain their mobile services, the operator explained to our colleagues at FranceInfo that the problem was "software-related," which resulted in random disconnections. This explains why some subscribers were still able to make calls while others were unable to use their phones for several hours.