The Federal Government has announced it will be investigating Wednesday’s unprecedented Optus outage, and asserted its support for customers who were affected by it and who may expect compensation.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the Australian Communications and Media Authority has already launched an investigation specifically whether mobile phone calls to Triple Zero were affected. Optus confirmed that landlines could not make emergency calls, but said that mobile phones were fine.
“It’s very important that we undertake an investigation into compliance here, but also how improvements can be made in the future to ensure the safety of all Australians,” she said, per ABC News.
We encourage any customers who need to contact emergency services to use a mobile line to call 000.
— Optus Help (@optus_help) November 7, 2023
Optus can confirm that Triple zero (“000”) calls will not work from an Optus landline (fixed line telephone). Mobile calls to 000 will work if another carrier is available.
Optus’ network went down at about 4am on Wednesday, and remained down until late in the evening. The outage affected 10 million customers, including 400,000 businesses who couldn’t sell items because EFTPOS readers were down. Melbourne’s train service was also affected, as was Uber.
Alarmingly, hospital communications also saw a hit. SA Health said in a statement that “hospital numbers including switchboards were impacted”.
At the same time, Victoria was seeing a dramatic increase in people calling for medical help because of thunderstorm asthma — with journalist Courtney Withers noting on ABC Radio that people were struggling to contact hospitals because of the Optus outage.
Rowland said that people would likely expect Optus to either reimburse or compensate customers who lost business.
“I think Australians are reasonable people, they expect when wrong has been done [to] them by a corporation, that that company will do the right thing,” Rowland told Channel Nine.
“There is that issue of customers who have been impacted and may be seeking compensation.
“It would seem very reasonable for Optus to look at how they can attempt to recompense people for this.”
Businesses who experienced losses are advised to keep receipts if they want to make a claim.
Optus, for its part, has profusely apologised for the outage and said it will be fully cooperating with the reviews. It hasn’t revealed what the cause of the outage was yet, other than that it was a “technical network fault”.
Image: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images
