SYDNEY, Nov 9 (NNN-AAP) – Millions of Australians woke up yesterday morning, with their mobile phones displaying “SOS” in the status bar, as the second-largest telecommunications company in Australia was plagued by a nationwide service outage.
With a customer base of over 10 million people, and 400,000 businesses nationwide, the Optus network handles about 51.3 million mobile calls and 51 million SMS messages on a typical day.
The hours-long outage not only left people missing out on calls, messages, or social media notifications, but also yielded a crippling effect on businesses, transport, and emergency services.
According to the IP Observatory at Monash University, Optus’ service breakdown began between 03:00 and 04:00 a.m. local time yesterday, and was most severe in Victoria and Queensland states.
Yesterday morning, Optus apologised for the inconvenience, conceding that, there was an issue affecting its mobile, fixed Internet, and phone services.
As a cluster of smaller mobile network providers, like Aussie Broadband and Amaysim operate on the Optus network, the pain of the outage was felt far and wide.
In the wake of the massive outage, major banks, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ANZ, and Westpac, issued statements about being unable to receive some phone calls from customers.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Chief Executive, Andrew McKellar, warned of the “significant impact” on all businesses, with small businesses that relied on Optus for day-to-day trade more keenly suffering the damage.
“Without internet connectivity, many businesses weren’t able to receive or process payments, weren’t able to trade, and therefore, weren’t able to open,” he told local media.
“Optus has more than 400,000 business customers and the flow-on effects to the Australian economy will be massive,” he said.
In Victoria’s capital, Melbourne, the outage sent all metro train services to a halt in the morning, with commuters encouraged to consider alternate travel arrangements, such as trams and buses.
Besides, as the outage disrupted Optus subscribers from calling Triple Zero, emergency service agencies across Australia also provided assistance in case residents needed urgent help.
Victoria’s Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority, reminded Optus customers to use alternative networks, both mobile and landline, until the outage is resolved.
As of 6:32 p.m. local time, the Optus network has been recovered but some National Broadband Network services may not be restored, as yet.
Optus CEO, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, described the outage as a “very rare occurrence” and said, their teams worked very hard to get services restored as quickly as they possibly could.
The outage problem came more than a year after the network operator was hit by a large-scale data breach. In Sept last year, Optus said, a cyberattack had exposed the data of up to 10 million current and former customers, with 2.8 million people significantly affected.– NNN-AAP
