Optus’ major outage across Australia highlights how “critical” telecommunications is to the lifeblood of society, according to Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre CEO Rachael Falk.
The outage has impacted millions of customers including transport services, hospitals and businesses.
“Core network is sort of the central nervous system for Optus – it’s a pretty big deal though if it’s taken out the entire network,” Ms Falk told Sky News Australia.
She discussed theories of what caused the outage in the early hours of Wednesday, including a network configuration potentially “gone wrong”.
“So it’s not unusual for that to happen early in the morning – it’s gone on now for seven hours though; that is high.”