Sydney: More than ten million Australians were cut off from internet and phone services on Wednesday following unexplained outages struck one of the country’s largest communications companies.
Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecoms firm and a subsidiary of Singtel, reported that it was scrambling to pinpoint and address the outages, which crashed electronic payment systems and disrupted phone lines for emergency services.
Company chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin told national broadcaster ABC that there was “no indication” the outage resulted from hacking or a cyberattack.
“Our team is still pursuing every possible avenue. We had a number of hypotheses and each one so far that we have tested and put in place new actions for has not resolved the fundamental issue,” she further stated.
She further said, “When we have identified the root cause and a time for restoration, we will be updating everybody as soon as we can.”
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The Australian government confirmed that mobile phones, landlines and broadband internet had been affected.
Optus said it had identified the outage at around 4:05 am local time.
However, extensive network issues were still plaguing the network more than seven hours later.
Numerous hospitals were unable to receive phone calls, and landline phones on the Optus network could not ring emergency services.
The poisons hotline in the state of New South Wales also said it got impacted.
And there was rush-hour chaos in the city of Melbourne after a “communications outage” caused disruptions to train services.
“Our teams are working to restore services as soon as possible,” an Optus company spokesman said.
He further said that Optus apologises sincerely to customers. —AFP
