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Optus Admits Lack of Preparedness for Nationwide Outage

Singtel denies its software upgrade was the root cause of the outage that left much of Australia without essential services for 12 hours.

Overview

  • Optus, Australia's second-largest telco, had no crisis plan in place for the scale of the recent nationwide outage, according to Optus managing director of networks Lambo Kanagaratnam.
  • The outage was triggered by a standard software upgrade at Singtel, Optus' parent company, but Singtel denies the upgrade was the root cause.
  • The outage lasted for 12 hours, leaving much of Australia unable to make payments, receive healthcare, or contact emergency services.
  • Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin confirmed that 228 calls to Australian emergency hotline Triple-0 failed to connect due to the outage.
  • The company is now facing a reputational crisis, following a massive data breach last year that exposed the personal data of 10 million Australians.