SYDNEY: More than 10 million Australians found themselves without internet and phone services on Wednesday due to unexplained outages affecting one of the country’s largest communications companies.
The mysterious glitch disrupted electronic payment systems, caused disruptions in phone lines used by essential services like ambulances and police, and even briefly halted rush-hour trains in Melbourne, the country’s largest city.
Optus, a subsidiary of Singaporean telecommunications company Singtel, reported that some services had been restored on Wednesday afternoon, but the company was unable to identify the root cause of the fault.
“Our team is still pursuing every possible avenue. We had a number of hypotheses, and each one that we’ve tested has not resolved the fundamental issue,” said Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, CEO of Optus, in an interview with national broadcaster ABC. She emphasized that there was “no indication” the outage was a result of hacking, despite a previous cyberattack that impacted millions of Optus customers over a year ago.
Worst Internet and Phone Services Outage in Australia
The outage affected various essential services, including hospitals, emergency hotlines, and transportation systems. Hospitals struggled to receive phone calls, and landline phones connected to the Optus network couldn’t reach emergency services. Melbourne experienced rush-hour chaos as a “communications outage” disrupted train services.
Organizations and businesses, including the federal department of education, the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and Australia’s Commonwealth Bank, confirmed that the issues had been resolved by Wednesday evening. However, Optus noted that it might take a few hours for all services to fully come back online.
Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowland described the outage as caused by a “deep fault” in a “fundamental” part of Optus’s network. She emphasized the frustration of customers and called for Optus to respond accordingly.
The Communication Workers Union labeled the outage an “absolute disgrace” and connected it to recent job losses at Optus. Experts, including Mark Gregory from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, pointed out the need for the government to enforce redundancy measures in the telecommunications industry to prevent such widespread failures in the future.
