French government officials are promising an audit of the nation’s wireless infrastructure in the wake of a massive technical failure that left millions of customers of France Telecom’s (FT’s) Orange wireless unit without cell phone service last Friday. Orange is the dominant player in the French wireless sector, and last Friday’s outage left 28 million customers nationwide unable to send or receive voice calls or text messages over a period of twelve hours before service was restored on Saturday morning. Although FT and its principal suppliers, Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, are continuing to investigate the cause of the incident, technicians believe the outage was initiated by a software glitch in equipment that is used to track wireless handsets and identify subscribers to permit transmission and receipt of calls and text messages. According to FT officials, the resulting flood in signal traffic through which customers attempted to place the same calls repeatedly in a futile effort to connect is believed to have brought down the network. An executive of Tekelec, a producer of wireless network signaling hardware, noted that such “signaling storms” are occurring more frequently on fourth-generation networks that “come with a new signaling protocol which is more immature and prone to failures than the system the industry has been using for the past decade.” A similar problem affected the wireless network s of DoCoMo of Japan and KT of Korea earlier this year, and T-Mobile USA experienced intermittent data outages in various parts of its network for a brief period of time last week. FT has promised a free day of service to all Orange wireless customers in compensation for the outage.