👉 Background: Optus is the country's second largest telco, with over 10 million customers nationwide. Unfortunately, that may change, because Optus suffered a nationwide outage that affected mobile phones, fixed-lines, and broadband services.

👉 What happened: The Optus outage also extended to Optus resellers like Amaysim or Coles Mobile as well as hospitals and public transport because they relied on Optus.

👉 What else: Optus is still digging into how this outage happened, but it was most likely due to a software change or engineering upgrade gone wrong. Now, they've got their work cut out for them by having to fix their broken network and their customers' broken trust.

What's the key learning?

💡Organisations that operate national infrastructure are accountable to their customers for more than just their product or service.

💡Alongside individual customers, Optus is relied on by hospitals, GPs, and even the Melbourne train system's communication system. This outage has majorly shaken the trust of Aussie customers, and now they're demanding accountability from Optus, and also protection against future issues.

💡Something similar played out with Vodafone in the early 2010's (aka VodaFail). And it lost close to 1.2 million customers in 2 years after a whole range of system failures and service disruptions.