First spotted this morning by customers in our area wondering if perhaps NBN’s crappy Fibre to the Node had struck again, it seems that it’s just Optus customers that are offline – and quite a few of them.
What looked like it might’ve just been a bit of rain in the telco pit has turned out to be a bit of an outage up and down Australia’s east coast, with large numbers of customers across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane reporting their fixed line NBN services aren’t working. Customers in Perth are also having some difficulties.
An Optus spokesperson said:
Due to a fibre break near our Mascot exchange, some people may be experiencing issues accessing Optus.com.au. Technicians are working to restore site access as a priority.
Customers who wish to access account information or assistance can do so via My Optus App, in store or by ringing us on 13 39 37.
Optus apologises for any inconvenience and thanks customers for their patience.
Website Down Detector gives you a good image of the breadth of the issue.
Compounding the outage, Optus’ website is also having a bit of a moment, noting that it’s down for maintenance … although that doesn’t seem to be the actual issue.
Optus hasn’t updated its website with any acknowledgement of the issue at the time of writing, but it has been responding to people on social media acknowledging there’s an issue.
Unfortunately, users are quick to blame the NBN for issues like this – and in FTTN areas, it’s almost a safe bet – but more often it’s issues within resellers own networks causing problems, and today its Optus’ turn to face widespread outages.
There’s no ETA for service resumption at this stage, and we’re waiting to hear back from Optus with further information.
It’s quite staggering how unwilling Optus are to widely acknowledge the issue. Also, the service status page reports no outages, regardless of which address/suburb I search.
My experience is that if you report a network problem, they’ll bounce back a day later that they’ve investigated and, no, it’s all working perfectly. No service. No refund. In the meantime, tough.