Federal Government To Review 14-Hour Optus Outage

Communications minister Michelle Rowland says the federal government’s review into Wednesday’s Optus outage must be “thorough in scope” and “goes into the precise issues” of its cause.

More than 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses were left without coverage in an outage that lasted 14 hours.

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On Thursday, the federal government announced it would review the outage, with no timeline given for the investigation yet.

Ms Rowland said the review would look at potential lessons from the outage.

“It’s important, I believe, to have a post-incident review that is both thorough in scope but also is completed expeditiously and goes to the precise issues of what has caused this, considering the considerable amount of disruption, the distress it has caused, but also the economic impact as well,” she told ABC TV.

“And to understand what [can] be done in future by the sector as a whole to take the lesson and mitigate that going forward.

“So, this is important, because Australians expect that there will be follow-up, that there will be lessons learned. But, importantly for the sector as a whole, it’s important to understand how this can be certainly avoided in future.”

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is also conducting its own investigation with Optus’s compliance to rules requiring emergency calls to be made via other networks when the services are unavailable. 

Optus customers had reported on Wednesday there were unable to call Triple Zero from their phones, despite the rules established.

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