optus

2 Articles

Australia’s Nationwide Phone Outage Was An Embarrassing Failure

August 27, 2026 by 28 Comments

The phones! They were one of the basic utilities of the 20th century, and were just about as reliable as death and taxes. Even when then power grid went down, you still had a fair shot of getting a phone call through thanks to the reliability of the Plain Old Telephone Service.

Today, we eschew the simplicity of copper and mechanical switches for the supreme bandwidth and capability of high-speed cellular connectivity. With that, we accept that the additional complexity comes with a risk of complicated failures that bring everything tumbling down. Australia’s largest telecommunications provider found that out to its peril just a few short months ago.

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Australia’s Second Largest Telco Went Dark, And Chaos Reigned

November 22, 2023 by 51 Comments

Engineers tend to worry about uptime, whether it’s at a corporate server farm or just our own little hobby servers at home. Every now and then, something will go wrong and take a box offline, which requires a little human intervention to fix. Ideally, you’ll still have a command link that stays up so you can fix the problem. Lose that, though, and you’re in a whole lick of trouble.

That’s precisely what happened to Australia’s second largest telecommunications provider earlier this month. Systems went down, millions lost connectivity, and company techs were left scrambling to put the pieces back together. Let’s dive in and explore what happened on Optus’s most embarrassing day in recent memory.

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