Australia: More than 10 million Australians have reportedly experienced internet and phone service cutoffs following an outage that hit the country’s second-biggest network operator, Optus.
The outage hit Australia in the morning on November 7, 2023, affecting payment systems and online operations as well as disrupting train services, including Melbourne.
The Australian government stated that mobile phones, landlines, and broadband internet had been affected. According to the report, the Optus CEO, Ms. Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, denied a cyberattack, but she also didn’t give a reason for the outage.
This network issue caused many hospitals to be unable to receive phone calls. It was not even possible to make emergency calls on the Optus network. Additionally, the state of New South Wales reported disruptions to the poison hotline.
This outage comes on the heels of a previous incident in September 2022, when the data of over 10 million Optus customers was hacked.
After six hours of outages, Optus said that some of the services were restored, but it would take some time to get the full network back.
Australia’s Communication Workers Union remarked that the outage was an “absolute disgrace”, saying it was connected to recent job losses at the company, a unit of Singapore Telecommunications.
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology researcher, Mr. Mark Gregory, noted that the incident indicates underlying issues in Australia’s communication networks.
“Single point of failure related outages have occurred too often over the past decades and it is time that the government steps in to force the telecommunications industry to build redundancy into the networks and systems,” Mr. Gregory observed.
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