The Federal government will undertake a post-incident telecommunications review into the Optus outage that affected millions of Australians yesterday.
Connectivity is absolutely essential for Australian consumers and businesses, and the impacts of this outage were particularly concerning.
While we welcome that Optus services were restored over the course of the day, it is critical the government conducts a process to identify lessons to be learned from yesterday’s outage.
In several states across the country, those who were connected to the telco provider were unable to access any networks on Wednesday 8 November, causing delays to transport, health and education services, alongside several businesses who were forced to close their doors.
At approximately 1.30pm on Wednesday, Optus reported its services were coming back online after almost 10 hours, however some customers have reported delays in services and issues later than 1:30pm.
In Melbourne, Victoria, Metro Trains reported delays to their services while the network was down leaving several commuters stranded or with delays to their work day.
Eastern Health said inbound and outbound calls were impacted, however, they managed to keep their services running as per normal.
Metro Trains CEO Raymond O’Flaherty said they apologise to their passengers for the delay to their travel after a communications outage stopped trains on the metropolitan network.
“Our engineers worked quickly to rectify the issue and we were able to resume trains shortly before 6am.”
“We thank passengers for their patience while trains return to their normal timetable,” he said.
The nation’s major banks, including Westpac, ANZ and CommBank also reported outages to their services, with several customers unable to access accounts, make or receive payments for the majority of the day.
Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland said she will task my Department with developing the terms of reference for a post-incident review. Further announcements around the terms of reference and next steps will be made in due course.
It is critical that industry and governments take stock following large-scale outages, given no network is immune.
The government hopes the review may also help support major telecommunications providers to improve post-outage processes.
Additionally, the regulator – the Australian Communications and Media Authority – has independently commenced an assessment to investigate Optus’ compliance with the rules requiring that emergency calls are successfully carried from mobile carriers to the Emergency Call Person (Telstra).
Customers were impacted across the nation, including in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, and Brisbane all recording widespread impacts from the outage.
The cause of the outage has not yet been confirmed, however, Optus has ruled out the chaos was caused by hackers.
