Optus is progressively restoring its services about eight hours after a nationwide outage left millions of Australian customers and businesses without mobile and internet services.
The company said services were gradually being restored, after they went down across the country at 4am AEDT. An Optus spokesperson said it “may take a few hours for all services to recover” and urged anyone in need of emergency services to contact triple zero from an alternative device.
“We are aware of some mobile phones having issues connecting to 000,” the spokesperson said.
“If Optus customers need to call emergency services, we suggest trying to find an alternative device.”
On X, formerly known as Twitter, Optus suggested “finding a family member or neighbour with an alternative device” in an emergency.
The company’s chief executive, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, told Sydney radio station 2GB that services were starting to be restored, but it remained unclear what had caused the outage. She had previously said it was highly unlikely to be due to a hack.
“We don’t have line of sight into the root cause. Our main priority has been on restoring service to customers,” Bayer Rosmarin said.
“We know how much everybody relies on our connectivity. We’re very, very sorry for this outage. We’re doing everything we can to bring it back up as quickly as we can.”
Bayer Rosmarin has also said the company was looking at providing compensation to “thank customers for their patience”.
Hospitals across Australia have been affected, while Melbourne’s entire train network was brought to a halt due to the outage.
The outage has also affected other companies using the Optus network, including Aussie Broadband, Amaysim, CatchConnect, Coles Mobile, Dodo and Moose Mobile.
According to the website DownDetector, users started reporting issues around 4am on Wednesday.
An Optus spokesperson had earlier said triple zero calls from landlines would not work.
The federal communications minister, Michelle Rowland, said a protocol was in place to allow Optus customers to “camp” on other mobile networks when needing to call triple zero. There has also been a marked increase in camping calls on Wednesday.
Rowland said it was too early to be talking about compensation for those affected but added that small businesses should be keeping their receipts “so that any recourse and redress that may be available to them has that evidentiary base”.
She also called on Optus to communicate with people about the issue, which she said appeared to be “a fault deep in the core”.
“Customers are clearly frustrated about it and Optus should respond to that accordingly,” she said.
The opposition’s communications spokesperson, David Coleman, described the outage as “catastrophic”.
“There’s no precedent for an incident of this kind and Optus needs to do everything it can to get this resolved … and the government needs to get on the front foot in assisting Optus to resolve this very serious issue,” he said.
Optus is the country’s second largest telecommunications provider and has 10.2 million customers, as well as several government contracts.
Melbourne’s Metro Trains uses Optus for both its primary and backup communication systems, according to union sources. The train operator said a “communicators error” linked to the Optus outage prevented trains from running across the entire metropolitan network at about 5am.
Train services resumed shortly after 6am, with major delays.
Metro Trains’ chief executive, Raymond O’Flaherty, said about 500 services had been cancelled.
“The trains are now running on all of our lines,” he said.
Hospital phone lines were also affected by the outage. Ramsay Health Care, which operates 73 private hospitals and day surgeries across Australia including Sydney hospitals St George Private, North Shore Private and Westmead Private, said its lines were down.
Northern Health and Eastern Health in Melbourne, which operate about a dozen public hospitals and the state’s virtual emergency department, reported the same issue.
A New South Wales Health spokesperson confirmed some of its phone and internet services were affected. “NSW Health continues to investigate the situation and is taking steps to minimise disruption to services where required.”
Patients and family members have also reported being unable to get through to the Peter MacCallum cancer centre, Royal Women’s hospital, the Royal Melbourne hospital, Royal Children’s hospital and St Vincent’s hospital.
The Royal Melbourne hospital said it had called a code yellow – indicating there was an internal emergency affecting service delivery – at all its campuses.
Ambulance Victoria said it had some issues with radio transmission and phone coverage as a result of the outage.
Fire Rescue Victoria also confirmed its call services were affected, but communications at Queensland Fire and Emergency Services are operating normally.
Both Coles and Woolworths said their stores were unaffected by the outage, though many small businesses have reported they were unable to process eftpos transactions.
The issue also appears to affect two-factor authentication services that rely on Optus to send out codes via text message to confirm a user’s identity.
Commonwealth Bank said some customers may encounter difficulties with services such as online banking as a result.
