Optus is the second largest telecommunications operator in Australia, with ten million customers (around 40% of the national population) and 98.5% of its huge territory covered. It provides both mobile connectivity and home broadband, and this Wednesday, November 8, suffered an unexplained nationwide service outage.
This outage is having far worse consequences than the already relevant one of losing all connectivity, both on the mobile network and on home or work Internet. This service interruption paralyzed payment systems and numerous online operations and even affected the transportation system.
10 million users but a whole country affected
The outage began at four o’clock in the morning. In addition to leaving its ten million users and some 400,000 businesses without connectivity, it interrupted some rail transport services in cities such as Melbourne, according to the local newspaper The Sidney Morning Herald.
At least eleven hospitals in Victoria lost telephone connections and several government offices were cut off. The local press has collected several testimonies of citizens who have told what this service failure has meant for them, including the inability to communicate between relatives of a baby admitted to the neonatal ICU, or the isolation of a daughter with her father when she was receiving the results of cancer tests. Even Uber drivers were left unable to operate the app that connects them with their customers.
Ramsay Health Care, a private hospital chain with 73 centers spread across Australia, said all its phone lines were out of service. Northern Health, the main public healthcare provider in Melbourne’s northern region, used its Facebook page to explain that they were unable to make or receive calls, giving alternatives for anyone who required to contact one of their centers.
Curiously, the chaos reached the physical stores of Telstra and Vodafone, the other main national operators, which saw huge queues forming for Optus customers who wanted to request a porting.
Bayer Rosmarin, the CEO of Optus, is in the eye of the storm, not so much for this outage as such, but for not having been able to identify what caused it, even once the service was restored at 6pm (local time), fourteen hours after it was interrupted. He limited himself to speaking of a “technical failure”.
And above all, because it is not the first crisis with his management at the helm: he already had to deal with a cyber-attack that managed to steal sensitive information of all its customers thanks to a breach of the software that guarded it.
However, the main complaint this time has to do with a lack of communication at such a delicate moment. Optus customers simply discovered the extent of the crash when other customers were talking about it among themselves and it ended up reaching the press, but the operator did not make any statement, not even through a spokesperson.
Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowland criticized this policy of silence at a time when people were “hungry for information” and said that Parliament will have to look into the crash and whether there may be consequences for the operator.
In Spain we suffered a massive fall by several operators earlier this year, but it was geographically uneven, as it was especially focused on the southern Mediterranean coast and the Orange network. Nothing to do with what Australia has suffered in recent hours.