As the dust settles on November 8th and possibly also on a considerable slice of Optus’ net worth, the debate and analysis continues around the causes and future implications of what has been described as Australia’s worst outage. Just to recap – around 4 am AEDT on Wednesday November 8th the Optus network went down for reasons as yet unexplained. This impacted directly over 10 million people and hundreds of thousands of businesses. Estimates speculate the economic loss at AU$ 2 billion. The core outage lasted around 13-14 hours although not all services were restored at the same time after that.
Optus is no stranger to this type of event – in September 2022 around 10 million Australians had personal information stolen by cyber criminals via unsecured Application Programming Interface software. Through the events of the 8th and following, Optus public communications were guarded and brief. The Optus website proclaimed variations on the theme that “The network has been restored, and customers should be back online. If you aren’t back online, please restart your handset or device. Optus sincerely apologises to customers for yesterday’s outage. We again thank customers for their patience”. At the time this first appeared, the network had allegedly not been 100% restored and ‘yesterday’s’ outage still continued into the following day. I’ll pass over the ‘have you tried switching it off and then switching it on again?” reference.
Majority shareholder Singtel’s decision to change Optus’ status to a private rather than a publicly-listed company has limited the disclosure required on an event such as this. So, whether any further information will be forthcoming on what caused this incident is still unsure. Optus’ offer of 200 GB of free data to affected parties seems generous just so long as their networks are able to cope with the flood of data coming along the line (weekends only). Communications Minister Michelle Rowland announced on November 9th that a post-incident review would be conducted since it was critical for both industry and governments to “take stock following large-scale outages, given no network is immune”. The terms of reference have yet to be announced.
This episode raises a number of issues. The Australian network system is, in places, fragile and vulnerable. The 2019-20 bushfires impacted almost 1400 telco facilities (including base stations, nodes, exchanges, shelters, copper and fibre cables). Half of these were offline for more than 4 hours – very few were damaged directly by fire as most were knocked out by the failure of mains power – the average outage incident lasted 3.5 days. While improved network resiliency may be impractical for most of Australia, an incident like this may dissuade many consumers and businesses from using a sole provider across all their comms and data needs.
While Optus may not have to disclose the cause of what happened on the 8th, it may face strong customer headwinds if it does not. The CEO’s vague explanation of what happened in 2022 does not inspire confidence for a focused explanation this time around. If you can’t explain what went wrong how can you claim to put it right? There is a tendency cross some tech industries not to discuss failures or downtime as if to do so implies guilt too strongly while the sharing industry-wide of learnings from incidents that happen would strengthen the industry as a whole and public confidence in it.
The incident also showed what we already knew – that Australia has an increasing digital dependence so having a network that is reliable is a necessity rather than a ‘nice to have’. The Optus brand like any other is based on values and once those are compromised then the cost of repairing that will be huge in comparison to putting right a damaged section of network, malfunctioning software or security protocols. The pandemic accelerated the move into a virtual world and while that may be irreversible, the events of the 8th indicated the risks of that move.