More than 10 million Optus customers were caught up in the network collapse, while hospitals, banks, and government departments were also affected.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said Richard Bean, a former deputy chair of the Australian Communications and Media Authority, will lead the review.
“The recent Optus outage caused significant disruption to the lives of millions of Australians, impacted small businesses, and left many without the ability to contact emergency services,” Rowland said.
“We need to learn the lessons from this serious incident because no network is immune from technical faults or outages.”
Optus customers have been offered 200 gigabytes of free data by the telco as compensation for the network outage.
The company’s chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned last week. She fell on her sword after a torrid 14 months for the telco, which began with a major data breach in September 2022 and then – at least under Rosmarin’s leadership – ended with a mass network outage.
The big four banks all experienced connectivity issues due to the fallout, while Melbourne’s metro rail network endured a brief shutdown in the early morning.
Some mobile calls to Triple Zero were affected, and Optus landlines were cut off from contacting emergency services.
The review will not examine technical causes of the outage and the appropriateness of compensation.
