Michelle ThompsonTen million people lose their power, rail systems malfunction, and companies are unable to make sales during an hours-long outage.
On Wednesday, the nation’s second-largest telecom provider failed and disconnected 10 million customers from Sydney to Perth and all surrounding areas, leaving nearly half of the population without phone or internet access.
On Wednesday morning, those who were impacted awoke to discover that their pay and tap machines were down, rail systems had failed, and people were unable to access the internet or place phone calls.
Optus, their provider, fought for hours to figure out what went wrong, leaving them in uncertainty.
Customers are advised by the firm to consider “finding a family member or neighbor with an alternative device,” which is not always simple in a nation where many people live in rural areas and may have to travel a considerable distance to get to the next residence.
People started to line up outside the stores of competing carriers in the hopes of purchasing a new SIM card, or they remained outside libraries in the hopes of obtaining free wifi, demonstrating the growing annoyance and rage of customers.
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, the CEO of Optus, eventually made a WhatsApp call to a Sydney radio station, most likely while using non-Optus wifi, to apologize for the disruption and reassure listeners that all efforts were being made to restore services. The power loss persisted into the evening.
The federal communications minister, Michelle Rowland, was forced to step in when the failure caused significant disruptions to health, transportation, and other important government services. She stated, perhaps subtly, that customers were feeling “a high level of anxiety and frustration.”
A communications issue throughout the train network, purportedly caused by the outage, caused all Melbourne metropolitan train services to be suspended at approximately 4.30 am.
Just before six in the morning, Metro Trains services were resumed; nevertheless, significant delays persisted during the morning rush hour as services were restored.
The virtual emergency department in Victoria as well as call centers for state government services in New South Wales, such as health, leisure, and driving and road services, were impacted. The outage shut off hospital phone connections in the Northern Territory.
Premier of South Australia, Peter Malinauskas, announced that his government would reevaluate its agreements with Optus. Rob Godwin, the director of the National Retail Association, claimed that the outage was costing his members “thousands of dollars” in lost sales.
Consumer advocates were unsure of how much money consumers would be able to recover, despite Optus’s advice to clients, particularly small businesses, to save their receipts in case they wanted to pursue compensation.
A portion of the customer fear stemmed from the belief that the downtime was a recurrence of the damaging hack Optus had the previous year, which exposed the personal data of ten million users.
Though Bayer Rosmarin stated that it was “very unlikely” that a hack was the source of the outage and that this kind of interruption was a “very, very rare occurrence,” people’s thoughts shifted to the possibility of a repeat cyberattack.
Wednesday afternoon saw the start of service restoration, and by 6 p.m., the network was completely operational once more, though the precise cause of the loss was still unknown.
According to one expert, the identical problem that brought down Facebook two years ago might have been the cause. When the network fell down, Cloudflare, a company that monitors a variety of online activities, observed an increase in border gateway protocol (BGP) announcements from Optus.
By telling the rest of the internet the quickest route to a specific point, BGP essentially serves as a roadmap for the internet.
Enex TestLab’s managing director, Matt Tett, stated that although he was unsure of the reason, Optus seemed to have experienced a routing issue at 4 a.m. that resulted in a massive spike in BGP notifications.
According to Tett, the reason it disrupted landline and mobile services in addition to the internet was because networks were now IP-based, meaning that if there was a problem with the internet protocol network, “absolutely, it will take down all their systems.”
Due to a BGP problem, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down for five hours in 2021.
