Australian telco Optus tells lawmakers it had no plan to address total outage

FILE PHOTO: View of an Optus shop in Sydney, Australia November 8, 2023. REUTERS/Kirsty Needham/File Photo

SYDNEY (Reuters) -Australia's second-largest telco, Optus, had no crisis plan when a network-wide outage left nearly half the country without phone or internet for 12 hours, an executive told parliament on Friday, acknowledging the company's defences had failed.

The Singapore Telecommunications-owned company had recently war-gamed scenarios in which the routers that direct voice and internet data failed in entire states, but it never expected a nationwide shutdown because it had alternate connections built into its network.