In the early hours of 8 November 2023, a widespread service disruption left Optus subscribers, Australia’s second-largest telecom provider, without Internet connectivity.
This extensive outage affected the fixed broadband and mobile communications of over 10 million individuals and 400,000 businesses and services, including 000 emergency services, hospitals, banks, and public transport services.
From what we know so far (Optus has yet to release a root cause analysis), a minor technical slip-up started a chain reaction that led to a big Internet blackout. Further analysis shows that a lack of robust, tested resilience protocols exacerbated the prolonged recovery period.
Due to the severity of the impact on the Australian public, the Australian Senate referred this matter to the Environment and Communications References Committee for inquiry, and its first public hearing was held on 17 November 2023. While prelimary actions are not focused on the incident itself, there is interest in how the industry can seek to improve its reseilience to cover such issues in the future.
We need to look at these mistakes and how they impact a country's Internet resilience together and learn from them. If we don’t, the same kind of problem will happen to someone else as we’ve already reported on the Pulse Blog in the last 18 months in Canada and Italy.
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