Government announces Optus review after 14-hour Australia-wide network outage

Optus is facing a government review into the 14-hour outage yesterday that left tens of millions of customers without phone or internet services for most of the day.

The telco giant’s network dropped out from about 4am on Wednesday, leaving hospitals, schools, financial institutions and government departments unable to make or receive calls for at least nine hours.

Some people’s ability to call triple zero was also affected by the nationwide outage.

The communications minister, Michelle Rowland announced the review will be conducted by the communications department, and that it would look at potential lessons from the outage.

Speaking to Nine’s Today program, Rowland said: “It is critical that industry and governments take stock following large-scale outages, given no network is immune.”

The terms of reference and next steps will be announced at a later date, the minister said.

Guardian Australia reported yesterday the outage was likely caused by a misconfiguration in the company’s network but Optus has yet to provide any detail on the cause.

The CEO, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, told Nine Entertainment that the outage was caused by a “technical network fault” but did not elaborate.

Services were restored by Wednesday afternoon, with the network fully up and running again by 6pm but still customers were left in the dark on the exact cause of the lengthy disruption.

The government’s announcement of a review comes as the Greens call for a separate federal parliamentary inquiry in the Senate to examine what was behind the outage.

“We need to make sure that all Australians have access to affordable and reliable internet and telecommunication, because otherwise life as we know it stops, and that’s what Australians right around the country experienced (yesterday) morning,” Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) is also separately conducting an investigation into Optus’s compliance with rules requiring emergency calls to fall over to other networks when the services are unavailable.

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Optus customers reported being unable to dial 000 from their mobile phones, despite the rules being in place.

Wednesday’s outage occurred only a year after the Singaporean-owned telco suffered a massive data breach from a cyber-attack that compromised the personal data of up to 9.8 million customers.

The industry watchdog has also asked for small businesses to discuss compensation options with Optus, given the impact on earnings during the failure. Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said the company would turn its attention to ‘thanking’ customers for their patience and “reward them for their loyalty” to Optus in the near future.

The government has not been pleased with Optus’s response, especially given the criticism the telco received in the wake of the massive data breach, for a lack of communication.

Financial services minister Stephen Jones told ABC radio RN Breakfast Rowland was left “trying to fill the gaps” to explain what was happening during the outage on Wednesday.

“It’s not her job as the minister to explain what’s going on inside of a company,” he said.

Businesses are counting the costs after the nationwide outage ground trading to a halt.