Optus has confirmed it has started to restore service to the millions of customers left without mobile coverage and cellular data since an outage began in the early hours of this morning.
It’s still not clear how the outage occurred. Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said it was caused by a “fault deep in the core” of the Optus network.
On Wednesday afternoon Optus confirmed it would gradually restore services in the coming hours.
The outage comes a little over a year after a sophisticated hacker breached Optus’ cyber-security and published customer details on the dark web.
The Optus outage
The outage affected some 10 million Australians. Customers couldn’t make calls, use cellular data on their phones or access Optus wifi.
It also meant Optus customers using landlines could not make emergency calls to triple-zero.
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said the telco was doing “everything” it could to get services back up and running, adding it would “not rest until” it had done so. There’s been no indication that a cyberattack is to blame for the outage.
Timeline to restore service
Optus confirmed in an update posted to its Facebook page that some services had already been fixed. Others would take a “few hours” before recovering.
Optus said it will continue to provide updates as new information is verified.
In an update this afternoon, an Optus spokesperson said, “We are aware of some mobile phones having issues connecting to 000. If Optus customers need to call emergency services, we suggest trying to find an alternative device”.