Optus Outage Leaves Millions in Australia Without Phone, Internet

Angus Whitley, Bloomberg News

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - OCTOBER 05: The Optus logo and slogan are displayed outside a store on October 05, 2022 in Sydney, Australia. The identification details of 9.8 million customers of the Telecommunications operator Optus was stolen in a data breach last week, one of the largest data breaches to occur in Australia. (Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images) , Photographer: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images AsiaPac

(Bloomberg) -- A nationwide outage that struck Australia’s second-largest telecommunications company Optus on Wednesday — wreaking havoc at peak hour as millions were left without phone and internet services — has been resolved.

“Services have now been restored, and customers should now be able to be back online,” Optus said on X. “Optus sincerely apologizes to customers for today’s outage. We again thank customers for their patience.”

Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., earlier said engineers were investigating a “network fault,” but didn’t provide details about the cause. The crash stretched from Perth in Western Australia and Darwin in the north, to east coast cities including Sydney and Brisbane, according to a network tracker on Optus’ website.

The outage exposed the country’s modern-day reliance on phone companies for a range of services. Train commuters stranded in Melbourne found themselves unable to call for ride-share services like Uber, while home workers were stranded without a web connection. Westpac Banking Corp. said it was unable to take some calls because of the crash.

The network failure is another blow for Optus, which last year was hit by a major cyberattack. That security breach exposed the details of almost 10 million former and current customers, while more than 2 million of them had identity document numbers compromised.

SingTel’s shares fell 4.8% in Singapore, breaking a five-day run of gains.

(Updates to add details in first and second paragraphs.)