I work for Orange, in a role that has reasonable contact with the Alcatal guys who manage the Orange broadband infrastructure. The outage was caused by an "unauthorised" change to the network which one of the Alcatel guys performed.

As I understand it, the effect of this was a permissions problem with the hardware located out at the switches and exchanges, and now requires an engineer to visit each of the 4000+ sites to restart a few bits of kit. You will find that one by one the regions come back up, but at present approx 50 per cent of the LLU customers are still offline. I would imagine it will be another day or so before the rest of the customers are back online.