A horror graph has exposed the true after-effect of Optus’ crash which saw millions of Australians unable to use its network, causing far-reaching havoc with hospitals, GPs, and phone lines across the country.
The outage, which has since been blamed on a failure with the telco’s core network, caused an almighty plunge in the telco’s share prices.
The rapid decline in shares of Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, came after the widespread blackout which started about 4am AEDT on Wednesday.
At 9am, its share price was SGD2.41 before peaking for the day 10 minutes later at SGD2.43.
By 11.43am, it had plunged to SGD 2.36.
Telstra’s share price, on the other hand, soared amid the unfolding drama.
It remained in the green throughout the day, hovering around AUD$3.90 in the afternoon.
More than 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses were impacted before services slowly returned to users in the early afternoon.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said customers were extremely frustrated with the national telco.
“Optus have not given a precise time frame. They have assured that they are working as quickly as possible but I reiterate that it is important for Optus to keep customers updated and in a timely way because this is precisely the questions that customers are asking,” she said.
As services begun being restored shortly after 12.30pm, Optus said in a statement it could take “a few hours for all services to recover, and different services may restore at different sites over that time”.
The outage created significant delays for commuters, impacted health services and affected online banking.
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin told ABC Radio the outage occurred at roughly 4.05am AEDT but she was doubtful the cause was a “hack”.
“There is no indication that there is anything to do with cyber at this stage,” she said.
She earlier confirmed the government was “seeking information from Optus on the major outage”.
“Our systems are actually very stable, we provide great coverage to our customers, this is a very rare occurrence.”
Ubers, small businesses and even snake catchers were among traders nationwide thrown into disarray by the outage.
The outages impacted carriers and fixed networks, meaning businesses that used the telco were without EFTPOS and were forced to trade in cash.
Countless reports of businesses affected by the outage flowed in from across the country.
Trevor Long, a leading Australian tech journalist, told 2GB it was the “biggest telco outage we’ve ever seen before”.
It’s the second major incident for the telco in two years after almost 10 million Optus customers had their personal details compromised in 2022 when hackers taunted the public for weeks by releasing the details of 10,000 customers on the dark web.
– With Jack Evans