Miriam, who did not want to disclose her surname, frantically tried to call the Royal Women’s Hospital between 3am and 5am as her contractions intensified. An automated voice told her the service was unavailable.
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Expectant mothers are told to phone midwives at the hospital when they go into labour to receive advice about when it’s best to present at the emergency department.
“We couldn’t get through,” Miriam said outside the hospital. “It was very stressful.”
Her husband, Dean, said they drove to the hospital from their home in Port Melbourne to be on the safe side.
“Now it’s backed up because that happened to a lot of people,” he said. “It’s crowded but they are doing a good job. We are waiting for a bed.”
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Rail commuters suffered major delays across the metropolitan network after all services were stopped early on Wednesday morning, but most lines were restored and experiencing good service by the afternoon.
Metro Trains said a problem linked to the Optus outage prevented the control centre from communicating with trains on the network and stopped them from running from before 5am.
“Our engineers worked quickly to rectify the issue, and we were able to resume trains shortly before 6am,” Metro Trains chief executive Raymond O’Flaherty said, apologising to passengers for the delays.
There were heated scenes outside the Optus store in Bourke Street mall in Melbourne’s CBD as waves of customers questioned staff about when their service would return. The Age witnessed at least two Optus customers in aggressive exchanges with staff – in one case a man stuck up his middle finger and yelled obscenities.
Many customers cut off from the internet hoped workers at the bricks-and-mortar stores may have more information, but staff said they couldn’t tell when the service would return and directed them to public phones and places with public Wi-Fi.
Ranish Kromodoyo and Anya Absalom struggle to make a call outside an Optus store.Credit: Chris Hopkins
Most people were calm but concerned, including international students Ranish Kromodoyo, 22, and Anya Absalom, 21, who said they had important assessments due by midnight and were without lights in their apartment because they had Wi-Fi controlled lights connected to a Google Home device.
“Just a few years ago people wouldn’t have considered it a massive thing when the internet went off,” said a bemused Kromodoyo, who uses Optus for NBN at home and for a mobile service.
“But now our TV, our phone, the assessments [are affected] … I can’t contact work.”
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Before services were gradually restored about 1pm, Victoria’s Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas urged Optus customers to call emergency services from phones on a non-Optus network.
The outage also affected radio transmission and phone coverage at Ambulance Victoria.
But Ambulance Victoria’s executive director of operational communications, Danielle North, said the situation was not disrupting emergency care, with ambulances being dispatched as normal.
“We have well-established processes in place for unexpected events such as this to ensure we can still respond to emergencies,” she said.
Business owners reliant on the Optus network were unable to accept eftpos payments from customers.
Theo Raussos, owner of The Quarter cafe in Degraves Street, said he had only recently switched from Telstra to Optus due to frequent drop-outs.
“I thought Optus had a better back-up system,” Raussos said. “I didn’t expect this. It’s huge.”
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