More than 10 million Australians were left without access to internet and phone services this Wednesday following an unexplained outage at one of the country’s largest telecommunications companies.
Telecom operator Optus said it was struggling to find and fix the fault, which caused electronic payment systems to fail and emergency phone lines to be disrupted.
There is “no indication” that the power outage was the result of a hacker or cyber attack, company chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosemary told Australia’s ABC television.
The Australian government said mobile and landline phones, as well as broadband internet, were affected. Dozens of hospitals were unable to receive phone calls and Optus landlines were unable to contact emergency services.
There was chaos in Melbourne during rush hour after a “communications failure” disrupted train services.
The outages come just over a year after the personal data of more than nine million Optus customers was stolen in a computer attack.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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