Optus says a “technical network fault” was to blame for a nationwide outage on Wednesday but would not elaborate further until a “thorough, root-cause analysis” is conducted.
The outage, first reported around 4am AEDT, affected more than 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses nationwide.
At 1pm AEDT, some Optus customers reported receiving signal again — some seven hours after the outage first hit — with the company confirming services were “gradually being restored” across the country, but it could “take a few hours” for a full recovery.
Speaking to ABC News on Wednesday afternoon, Ms Bayer Rosmarin repeated her apologies on behalf of the outage, but said Optus was unable to provide any further detail about the outage until it conducted a thorough investigation.
“Until we’ve done a full, thorough, root-cause analysis, we really can’t provide more information,” she said.
“What I can say is that it was a technical network issue, and that our teams have worked very, very hard to get services restored as quickly as they possibly could.”
Ms Bayer Rosmarin said it was a “very rare occurrence” for Optus’s services to be so widely affected by an outage.
“As a critical infrastructure provider, we strive to have our services available 365 days a year 24/7, and we largely succeed,” she said.
“In my three and a half years, as the CEO of Optus, we’ve never had an outage of this nature.
“So it’s a very rare occurrence, but unfortunately, it does happen. It happens to telcos all around the world. It happens to other telcos in Australia.
“We try and avoid it happening and we will make sure we learn as much as we possibly can from what occurred and hopefully keep it as an extremely rare occurrence.”
Ms Bayer Rosmarin told the ABC that there was “no indication” of a cyber incident causing the outage, and stressed the company was “going the extra mile” for its customers.
It is the latest reputational headache for the telecommunications provider, after it suffered a major cyber attack in September 2022, which led to more than 2 million customers having their personal identity documents compromised by hackers.
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