OPINION
As more and more people are finding out, as the reality of ‘Net Zero’ bites hard, you don’t realise how much you depend on modern technology until it’s gone. Even 100 years ago, H G Wells remarked that everyone who pined for the ‘good old days’ of the 19th century would change their mind as soon as they got their first toothache.
Customers of Australia’s second-biggest telco may not have had a toothache, but they had a gigantic headache last Wednesday, as Optus’ entire network crashed for fully 12 hours.
It wasn’t just a case of Becky McInfluencer not being able to update her TikTok status, either. As Optus customers found, telecommunications affect nearly everything we do.
Optus customers were left furious following Wednesday’s outage, which was not only an inconvenience but cost businesses thousands of dollars and put lives at risk.
More than 10 million customers were affected across the country when one of Australia’s largest telecommunication providers crashed, leaving people without phone service or access to the internet for at least nine hours.
The federal government has already announced an investigation into the outage, to ensure the industry learns any lessons from the incident.
Businesses were one of the hardest hit, with many who rely on EFTPOS machines unable to serve customers and some forced to shut up shop as a result.
ABC Australia
But, with plenty of government contracts on its books, the Optus outage affected everything from transport to emergency services. Issues were reported across the country. Hospitals were pushed into a code-yellow alert (internal emergency) alert. The entire Melbourne suburban rail network was shut down for at least half an hour.
The unprecedented failure of the nation’s second largest carrier caused chaos for emergency services, hospitals, transport and businesses.
The federal government savaged the company for acting too slowly to alert and update customers, after it was forced to ensure triple-0 emergency services remained operational, while the South Australian government warned it would consider switching carriers.
This is the second big scandal to hit Optus in just over a year. Previously, in a massive cyber-security breach, Optus’ database was hacked and a trove of personal and identity information scavenged by criminals. In that case, Optus was accused of acting too slowly.
The same charge is being made again.
The Optus network went offline about 4am (AEDT) on Wednesday, with the company issuing its first statement online at 6.45am. Chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin did not speak publicly until a radio interview at 10.30am.
It took until mid-afternoon for the company’s engineers to start the process of restoring some services, with the entire network back online by 6pm.
So, what caused it? The company is denying that it was caused by a major network upgrade.
Ms Bayer Rosmarin told The Australian the company “had some ideas” what had caused the outage but would wait until its engineers had conducted a full investigation before sharing further details. “What I can say is it is a very technical network engineering issue,” she said […]
“As a critical infrastructure provider, we aim to give our customers a service that works 100 per cent of the time every day of the year, 24/7, and on most days we succeed,” she said.
Most days.
To add insult to injury, the company is ruling out refunds.
However, executives at Optus have ruled out any refunds for customers, with Ms Bayer Rosmarin saying that “refunding people for one day is probably less than $2”.
“We are going to look at how we reward our customers for their loyalty and patience,” she told The Daily Telegraph, deciding rather than direct compensation that “we might choose to do something that is more valuable”.
“We are going to look at how we reward our customers for their loyalty and patience”, she said, although she repeatedly declined to be specific.
Optus managing director of customer solutions Matt Williams also told the Telegraph that “we are not talking about compensation”.
The Australian
One suspects that businesses, from the Commonwealth Bank to local cafes, who lost hours of service, will be thinking rather differently.