On Friday, January 19, Free Mobile users did not receive the tsunami alert sent by FR-Alert, the state alert system indicating imminent danger. An error that the operator is investigating.
This Friday, January 19, 2024, between 10 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., residents of several departments in the south of France (Alpes-Maritimes, Var, Bouches-du-Rhône, Gard, Hérault, Aude , Pyrénées-Orientales, Haute-Corse and Corse-du-Sud) received a tsunami alert on their phone. Don’t worry, however, because it was simply a full-scale exercise to test the system. FR-Alert, a system put in place by the Government in 2022 to warn all people with a mobile phone in real time of their presence in a threatened area. All people located in these departments received a tsunami alert on their Smartphone. Unfortunately, it appears that this test did not work for all operators. If customers of Bouygues, SFR or Orange have indeed received the alert, this is not the case for Free Mobile subscribers.
FR-Tsunami alert: Free Mobile subscribers did not receive the alert
As reported by users on the social networkFreebox universe, Free Mobile subscribers located in the regions concerned did not receive the FR-Alert test message. For its part, the operator has already started to investigate this anomaly. According to initial reports from Xavier Niel’s company, “some mobiles do not have the FR-Alert setting: test/exercise activated by default“. Because if this setting is activated by default on iPhones and other latest generation smartphones, this has not always been done on older phones. However, this does not explain the widespread failure. To answer to this problem, Free subscribers have also looked into the question.
According to them, the failure of Free’s FR-Alert test could come from SIBs (System Information Blocks). The SIB12, which is supposed to transmit information about the commercial mobile alert system, was not issued by Free on the network, as reported by a netizen on X. However, this theory has not been confirmed and we do not yet know the exact reason why Free Mobile customers did not receive the alert. Obviously, this is not necessarily very reassuring for subscribers, but the tests are done for this and a solution could soon be found. In the coming weeks, a new test should take place with “reports of possible malfunctions identified”, indicated the Var prefecture. To be continued…