Down Down: OPTUS IS DOWN – National Outage affecting Australia’s #2 Carrier

Australians are waking up to one of the biggest Telco outages in memory with the Optus Mobile and Home Broadband networks affected by the outage.

There are reports on social media of outages from as far North as Cairns, down to Melbourne and across to Perth.

It appears the outage began just after 3am, and with both Mobile and Home Broadband affected, it can only be a fundamental issue within the Optus Network.

The outage is affecting brands using the Optus network like Vaya, Amaysim and others.

Optus is responding to social media complaints with the following:

We’re aware of an issue impacting connections for some Optus customers. We understand connectivity is important and are working to restore services as a priority. We apologise for any inconvenience caused while we have the issue resolved.

Optus Help

EFTM has reached out to Optus for comment and and have been told:

• We are aware of an outage impacting our customers.
• Our teams are working to restore services as soon as possible.
• We will provide an update as soon as we are able.
• Optus apologises sincerely to customers.

After 6 hours of an outage, that just doesn’t cut it I’m sorry.

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer-Rosmarin has spoken to the ABC and it appears the business has yet to not only solve the problem, but are unable to determine the source of the issue

ABC:  Can you tell us why the system’s gone down?

Optus CEO: Unfortunately, I don’t have more information to give at this stage. We have had issues since 4am. The team has tried a number of parts of restoration so far we have not had the results that we have hoped for. And we’re pursuing every avenue to get everybody back online as soon as possible.

ABC: Do they know what happened though? Who’s there the team that you’ve got working on it?

Optus CEO: Our team is still pursuing every possible avenue. We had a number of hypotheses and each one so far that we’ve tested and put in place new actions for has not resolved the fundamental issue. So we’re still working on it. And when we have a identified root cause and a time for restoration, we’ll be updating everybody as soon as we can.

Transcript – Kelly Bayer-Rosmarin on ABC Radio

The wide-reaching impacts are becoming clear now. Commonwealth Bank customers are unable to do major transfers as the SMS verification system relies on Optus:

Electric Vehicle Chargers on the Evie network will not interact with their App so cannot be initiated other than with a physical tap and go membership card:

And of course Small businesses who have payment terminals using the Optus Network cannot accept transactions.

As yet, it appears a Cyber Attack is unlikely, but at this stage, short of hearing from Optus – we don’t know.

Given the extent of the outage to Home Broadband users, the NBN has issued a statement confirming the issue is soely that of Optus:

• At the wholesale level the nbn network is performing normally and as we would expect. However, Optus nbn customers may be experiencing difficulties with connecting to the nbn as a result of the Optus outage.