Optus is progressively restoring services roughly eight hours after a nationwide outage left millions of Australian customers and businesses without mobile and internet access. The disruption began at 4am AEDT, with engineers investigating a network fault. An Optus spokesperson said it “may take a few hours for all services to recover” and advised anyone needing emergency services to contact triple zero from an alternative device, as some mobile phones and landlines were unable to connect to 000.
Chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said services were starting to be restored but the root cause remained unclear, adding that a cyber attack was highly unlikely. “We know how much everybody relies on our connectivity. We’re very, very sorry for this outage,” she told Sydney radio station 2GB. The company is also considering compensation to “thank customers for their patience”.
The outage caused significant disruption, including to Melbourne’s entire train network, which was halted for about an hour with roughly 500 services cancelled. Hospital phone lines were also affected, with Ramsay Health Care, Northern Health and Eastern Health reporting outages, while NSW Health confirmed some of its phone and internet services were impacted. Other providers relying on Optus’s network, including Aussie Broadband, Amaysim, CatchConnect, Coles Mobile, Dodo and Moose Mobile, were also affected.
Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said a protocol allowed Optus customers to “camp” on other networks when calling triple zero, and urged small businesses to keep receipts for potential compensation claims. Opposition communications spokesman David Coleman described the outage as “catastrophic”, saying “there’s no precedent for an incident of this kind”. Optus, the country’s second-largest telecommunications provider, has 10.2 million customers and several government contracts.
