Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has revealed she has not been given a “definitive statement” from Optus on what caused the mass outage which brought the network down for 10 million customers.
In a fiery interview with Karl Stefanovic, Rowland confirmed she had “not seen” anything in writing to confirm exactly what happened.
“As I understand it, yesterday there was a serious fault in the core network of Optus, affecting its broadband, landline and mobile services,” Rowland told the Today host.
READ MORE: Federal Government announces review into mass Optus outage
“I have not seen a definitive statement from Optus to confirm that, but from my understanding and what has been described, based on the scale and scope and other commentators, that would appear to be what has occurred.”
The network was out for around 14 hours yesterday, with businesses, hospitals and emergency services all impacted.
Rowland said it was pleasing to see services are now restored, but that can’t undo the stress the outage caused to so many people and the fact there still is no clear answer on why it happened.
“You must be ropable that as Communications Minister, you don’t know what’s happened with that definitive nature, but worse, the customers don’t know what happened?” Karl said.
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But she said above all, it is the customers who are owed an explanation as to what happened.
“Accountability is of the utmost importance here and I think most reasonable Australians and knowing what I know about the telco sector and outages that have occurred in the past, it would seem very reasonable for Optus to look at how they can attempt to recompense people for this,” she said.
“I haven’t seen a definitive announcement in this respect yet, but again that does not obviate their obligation under existing Australian Consumer Law, under contracts and also the telecommunications industry ombudsman scheme.”
Today tech expert Trevor Long said Optus “absolutely knows” what the fault was.
“Optus won’t tell us what it is – but they fixed it so they know,” he said.
“They know, but they won’t tell us if it was network related, routing related, or a cyber attack which we know it wasn’t, because we’d know that by now.”
See Karl’s full interview with Rowland in the video above
