‘Failure to provide credible, honest and forthright information’: Senate Committee report slams Optus following mass outage

A Senate Committee has found that Optus failed to provide “credible, honest and forthright” communication during last year’s unprecedented national outage, and should be forced to provide fair compensation should another outage occur.

The outage – which occurred November 8, 2023 and lasted about 12 hours – left an estimated 10.2 million customers and 400,000 businesses without mobile or internet service, and prevented almost 3,000 calls to Triple Zero. Also affected were subscribers to other operators that rely on the Optus network, including Dodo, Amaysim, and Moose.

Optus faced widespread backlash on the day for poor communication, and the Senate Committee – led by Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young – found that during the outage, two aspects of the telco’s communications were “particularly striking” – the timeliness and comprehensiveness of its public communications and its deficiencies in communicating with Government and essential service organisations.