Optus outage: Government announces review

Optus says it will “fully co-operate” with both reviews.

“As a critical infrastructure provider, we understand how important it is to ensure continuity of service and any lessons learnt are likely to be helpful for both Optus and others in our industry,” the telco’s vice president of regulatory and public affairs Andrew Sheridan said.

“We value our customers’ loyalty, and are looking at ways to say ‘thank you’.

“Optus once again apologises to our customers and others that were impacted by the outage.”

Speaking on Nine’s Today program, Rowland said the government would aim to complete the review into Optus’ outage as soon as possible.

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“We’ll be aiming to [complete the review] most expeditiously because we understand that consumers and businesses are exactly as you say, are very frustrated and will want some answers,” Rowland said.

“I think the terms of reference here also need to apply across the industry because we need to take those lessons for the other carriers and service providers as well.”

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said there was a need to understand how Australia’s second-largest telecommunications service let this failure happen.

“This is not a small matter and the parliament will have to look at what Optus can and should be doing, what they knew, how this failure happened and there needs to be … consequences for this type of outage,” she said.

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“It is not good enough for this big company, Optus, to simply phone it in through a radio interview this morning, rather than fronting the customers, talking to the press and telling Australians what’s going on.”

The outage began about 4am AEDT. Some services began to work again just before 1pm, almost nine hours later. But full restoration of the network took until 8pm, 16 hours after issues started. 

It affected more than 10 million Optus customers and about 400,000 businesses, crippling transport systems, hospitals and government departments across the country.