Why over 10 million Australians went ‘offline’ for hours

Over 10 million people in Australia were offline after the country’s second largest telecom company Optus was hit by a technical network fault. People were without internet or phone on Wednesday (November 8) and the outage affected payment, transport and health systems.
As per a report by ABC, the outage was first reported about 4 am local time (10:30 pm IST on Tuesday).The company said that most services should be back online as the network has been restored.
“The Optus Network has been restored and most services should now be back online. Some customers may need to restart their device or turn flight mode on then off,” the company said in a post on X.
“Some NBN connections may not be restored as yet. We are investigating customer complaints. Please try restarting your modem by turning it off, unplugging it for 30 seconds, and restarting. Our people are doing their best to respond to your concerns, and Optus sincerely apologises for today’s outage. We again thank customers for their patience,” it added.

What caused the outage
Some 10 million Australians, which is 40% of the population, are Optus customers and could not use smartphones, broadband internet or landlines for much of the day, a report by Reuters said. Many Optus customers woke up to see their phones had lost connectivity and the company CEO said that the outage was first noticed by Optus at 4:05 am AEDT on Wednesday.
Optus said that the company is working to identify the cause, and ruled out the possibility of a cyber attack.
The telecom giant blamed a “technical network fault” for the nationwide outage but said that it would not elaborate further until a “thorough, root-cause analysis” is conducted.
“Until we’ve done a full, thorough, root-cause analysis, we really can’t provide more information,” said Optus CEO Bayer Rosmarin.
“What I can say is that it was a technical network issue, and that our teams have worked very, very hard to get services restored as quickly as they possibly could,” she added.