Outrage over Wednesday’s Optus blackout is building in government circles and one state’s premier has threatened to pull multimillion-dollar contracts with the embattled telecommunications giant.
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas made the dramatic threat on Wednesday afternoon, saying the company needed to be “held to account” for the dramatic breakdown that crippled the ability of South Australians using Optus landlines to dial Triple zero.
“They have let their customers down throughout the state, including the government,” he said.
“And Optus needs to respond swiftly, communicate effectively, with everybody about exactly what is going on here.
“There hasn’t been a great degree of communication coming out of Optus up until to this point, which I think is disappointing but not anymore disappointing than the fact the service isn’t operating itself.”
Mr Malinauskas said his government would contemplate switching providers after first putting out the fires of the day.
“If Optus want to seek government as a customer, they need to be a reliable service in this modern age,” he said.
“Telecommunications is critical to the function of government.
“We have a contract with Optus, as do other governments around the country. That is something we will turn our mind to.”
More than 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses have been impacted after Optus’ mobile services went down at 4am AEDT on Wednesday.
The premier said critical services remained operational but there had been impacts on SA Health and other government agencies.
“In SA Health we are most concerned about the mental health triage service,” he said.
“Where people are looking to contact the mental health triage service, that outbound call coming in is a challenge.”
The federal government has confirmed the nationwide outage was triggered by a fault in Optus’ core network.
While Optus has yet to reveal the root cause behind the blackout on Wednesday, experts have suggested it was most likely a software upgrade failure given that most updates occur between 2am and 4am.
Optus customers are now slowing getting their service back.
Speaking at a press conference, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said customers were extremely frustrated with the national telco.
“Optus have not given a precise time frame. They have assured that they are working as quickly as possible but I reiterate that it is important for Optus to keep customers updated and in a timely way because this is precisely the questions that customers are asking,” she said.
Optus has been contacted for a response