Nationwide outages hit a major Australian communications company Wednesday, disrupting phone lines, crashing payment systems and impacting millions of customers.
Optus said it was scrambling to restore its mobile and internet services to more than 10 million customers across Australia.
Company chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin told national broadcaster ABC there was “no indication” the outage was the result of hacking or a cyber attack — but that engineers were yet to pinpoint the issue.
“Our systems are actually very stable. We provide great coverage to our customers, this is a very rare occurrence,” she said.
“And when I have more information about the root cause, I will be the first to let our customers know.”
Optus said they identified the outage at around 4:05 am local time.
Widespread issues were still being reported across Australia more than seven hours later.
Dozens of hospitals were unable to receive phone calls, and landline phones on the Optus network could not ring emergency services.
The poisons hotline in the state of New South Wales also said it was impacted.
“Our teams are working to restore services as soon as possible,” an Optus…
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