Optus blames ‘technical network fault’ for outage but needs further investigation to determine root cause

Optus says a “technical network fault” was to blame for a nationwide outage on Wednesday but would not elaborate further until a “thorough, root-cause analysis” is conducted.

The outage, first reported around 4am AEDT, affected more than 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses nationwide.

At 1pm AEDT, some Optus customers reported receiving signal again — some nine hours after the outage first hit — with the company confirming services were “gradually being restored” across the country, but it could “take a few hours” for a full recovery. 

Speaking to ABC News on Wednesday afternoon, Ms Bayer Rosmarin again apologised for the outage, but said Optus was unable to provide any further detail about the outage until it conducted a thorough investigation.

“Until we’ve done a full, thorough, root-cause analysis, we really can’t provide more information,” she said.

“What I can say is that it was a technical network issue, and that our teams have worked very, very hard to get services restored as quickly as they possibly could.”

Ms Bayer Rosmarin said that there was “no indication” of a cyber incident causing the outage, and there is no regulation that could have prevented the outage.

During her interview with the ABC — which was limited to just five minutes by Optus — Ms Bayer Rosmarin apologised three times for the outage and letting down customers.

The Optus boss also rejected claims from the Communications Workers Union that 600 job cuts at Optus were partly to blame for the nationwide outage.

“I don’t think that that’s at all related,” she said.

“We have a lot of dedicated fantastic people at Optus who really try and do their best for our customers every single day, and we really had a fantastic top notch team of engineers working very hard today to restore services as quickly as possible.

“We’re very sorry that this occurred and we will take all the learnings.”

Communication and compensation

Optus was widely criticised on Wednesday morning for its lack of proactive communication, but Ms Bayer Rosmarin defended the company’s response.

“We had messages out early, letting our customers know of the outage. We gave more than seven media updates during the day, I went on a number of radio stations.

“Unfortunately, when you have an outage like this, the only message customers want to hear is that we’ve restored the network, and so we gave information and updates as soon as they were available.

“But it’s only in the afternoon that we were able to let customers know that the service was fully restored.”

Asked about possible compensation for affected customers, Ms Bayer Rosmarin said the company was considering its options now services were returning.

“We’re now thinking about ways in which we can thank our customers for their patience as we work through the outage today, and rewarding them for their loyalty to Optus,” she said.

When pressed about providing compensation, Ms Bayer Rosmarin said Optus would “definitely consider every avenue”.

“We understand how much people rely on our connectivity, and that’s why we strive to give our customers a fantastic service that’s extremely reliable, great value for money, and includes unique features they can’t get anywhere else.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin said it was a “very rare occurrence” for Optus’s services to be so widely affected by an outage.

“As a critical infrastructure provider, we strive to have our services available 365 days a year 24/7, and we largely succeed,” she said.

“In my three and a half years, as the CEO of Optus, we’ve never had an outage of this nature.

“So it’s a very rare occurrence, but unfortunately, it does happen. It happens to telcos all around the world. It happens to other telcos in Australia.

“We try and avoid it happening and we will make sure we learn as much as we possibly can from what occurred and hopefully keep it as an extremely rare occurrence.”

It is the latest reputational headache for the telecommunications provider, after it suffered a major cyber attack in September 2022, which led to more than 2 million customers having their personal identity documents compromised by hackers.

The data breach led to a class action lawsuit being lodged on behalf of affected Optus customers, with law firm Slater and Gordon pursuing a “substantial” compensation figure.

Optus reimbursed some customers who had to replace their identity documents, with others offered other benefits like extra data or waived bills.