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Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has announced the federal government will conduct a review into Wednesday’s Optus outage, labelling the network fault as “particularly concerning”.

Millions of Australians were unable to make or receive calls and access the internet for up to 16 hours due to the outage. Optus has yet to identify the cause of the issue.

Rowland said the review would ensure “lessons were learned” from the outage.

“Connectivity is absolutely essential for Australian consumers and businesses, and the impacts of this outage were particularly concerning,” Rowland said in a statement.

“It is critical that industry and governments take stock following large-scale outages, given no network is immune.

“I will task my department with developing the terms of reference for a post-incident review. Further announcements around the terms of reference and next steps will be made in due course.”

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has announced a government review into the outage.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The communications regulator – the Australian Communications and Media Authority – will also be conducting a separate review due to the impact of the outage on emergency calls.

During the outage, triple zero phone calls could not be made from Optus landlines, with the telco encouraging users to find a “family member or neighbour” with a different service provider.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said there was a need to understand how Australia’s second-largest telecommunications service let this failure happen.

“This is not a small matter and the parliament will have to look at what Optus can and should be doing, what they knew, how this failure happened and there needs to be … consequences for this type of outage,” she said.

Lines outside an Optus store in Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall on Wednesday.Credit: Chris Hopkins

“It is not good enough for this big company, Optus, to simply phone it in through a radio interview this morning, rather than fronting the customers, talking to the press and telling Australians what’s going on.”

The outage began about 4am AEDT. Some services began to work again just before 1pm, almost nine hours later. But full restoration of the network took until 8pm, 16 hours after issues started. 

It affected more than 10 million Optus customers and about 400,000 businesses, crippling transport systems, hospitals and government departments across the country.

The outage came after almost 10 million Optus customers had their personal information stolen when the company’s data system was breached last year.

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