Allan said the disruption was distressing for affected customers, adding that the telco needed to do better to provide an important service to the community.
Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas on Thursday morning said she understood it would have been distressing not to be able to contact hospitals during the outage.
“But I want to assure all Victorians that our health services have workarounds in place, they rehearse for these scenarios. I can assure everyone patient care was not compromised at all,” Thomas told ABC Radio.
“We had a range of workarounds in place, we got through the day. I think the onus is really on Optus to come out and explain to the Australian people exactly what has gone wrong, but also why they were so slow to let us know what the situation was.”
Thomas said there were always improvements to be made to ensure systems worked as well as possible.
She said she would speak to the federal government about ensuring triple-zero is always accessible, after emergency calls were unable to be made from Optus landlines.
The Bourke Street Optus store was inundated with angry customers on Wednesday.Credit: Chris Hopkins
Deputy Liberal leader David Southwick said the emergency call system needed to be able to withstand any outage and the government had to find a resolution to ensure it was always accessible.
The communications regulator – the Australian Communications and Media Authority – will also be conducting a separate review due to the impact of the outage on emergency calls.
Optus has committed to cooperating with reviews.
“As a critical infrastructure provider, we understand how important it is to ensure continuity of service and any lessons learnt are likely to be helpful for both Optus and others in our industry,” the telco’s vice president of regulatory and public affairs Andrew Sheridan said.
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Metro Trains said a problem linked to the Optus outage prevented the control centre from communicating with trains on the network and stopped them from running shortly before 5am.
“Our engineers worked quickly to rectify the issue, and we were able to resume trains shortly before 6am,” Metro Trains chief executive Raymond O’Flaherty said, apologising to passengers for the delays.
