Liberal Senator James Paterson has revealed the one aspect of Optus’ enormous outage that disturbed him the most.
More than 10 million customers of the telecommunications giant were unable to make calls and use the internet for several hours on Wednesday due to a “technical network issue”.
Australians could not contact their loved ones via hospital phone lines, Melbourne’s metropolitan train service fell over and businesses were left without EFTPOS services.
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin later apologised for the service interruption but could not confirm if refunds would be offered to affected customers.
Speaking to Sky News Australia on Thursday, Mr Paterson said it was “not okay” for one of Australia’s major carriers to go down for at least nine hours.
“It is concerning that Optus still doesn’t have an explanation,” he told host Peter Stefanovic.
“I appreciate that these matters are complex and it is not always straight forward but there should be much more information shared with Optus customers and the public.
“Because we all need to understand how this happened and how to prevent it from happening again because the consequences have been very serious.”
The shadow minister for home affairs went on to share the one detail about the debacle which bothered him the most.
“It’s one of the most disturbing things for me about this situation which is that it has demonstrated that our systems are not very resilient and that we don’t have adequate redundancies in place,” he said.
“Businesses should still be able to trade if there is a disruption to one of the networks.
“Although it doesn’t appear in this case to be a cyberattack, it’s certainly the sort of thing that a foreign adversary would like to do to Australia in a time of crisis.
“And if they try and do that and if they are successful, we need a lot of redundancy in the system.”
Mr Paterson characterised the matter as a “national security issue,” arguing Australia’s telecommunication’s companies are systemically important to the nation.
“We can’t afford for them to fall down for extended periods of time,” he said.
“If they do we need better redundancies in place.
“Because next time … it might be on multiple companies. It might be on Telstra too and imagine the consequences for our society.”
Optus was hit by a major cyber attack in 2022 which led to the personal details of about 2.8 million customers being leaked.
Hackers stole sensitive information including passport and driver’s licence numbers, email and home addresses as well as phone numbers.
A class action was filed against the telco a few months later and the company has since been plagued with customer complaints.
The Albanese government launched a probe into the attack in February of 2023 and vowed to beef up Australia’s cyber security legislation.
It is understood the latest outage is not the result of a cyber hack.