Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said there was a need to understand how Australia’s second-largest telecommunications service let this failure happen.
“This is not a small matter and the parliament will have to look at what Optus can and should be doing, what they knew, how this failure happened and there needs to be … consequences for this type of outage,” she said.
Lines outside an Optus store in Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall on Wednesday.Credit: Chris Hopkins
“It is not good enough for this big company, Optus, to simply phone it in through a radio interview this morning, rather than fronting the customers, talking to the press and telling Australians what’s going on.”
The outage began about 4am AEDT. Some services began to work again just before 1pm, almost nine hours later. But full restoration of the network took until 8pm, 16 hours after issues started.