Second largest telco in Australia goes down, grinds half the country to a halt

Australia's second-largest telecommunications provider -- Optus -- has gone down and has been down since the early morning hours in the country. Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has said that the company is on a "path to restoration" right now.

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It's now past 12 p.m. in Sydney, Australia, and millions of Australians are without a working phone or internet connection, unable to call emergency services or the police. The Optus CEO said: "Unfortunately, it was a nationwide outage ... [we are] very, very sorry that this occurred; we know how important it is for all our customers to be connected, and we have been working tirelessly since the outage started to restore services for our customers".

Personally, I'm with Optus and woke up to these issues. I couldn't make any phone calls and had no data service out of the house, so all of my financial services were pretty much useless (I don't use physical cards, tap-and-go is so relevant here in Australia), and worst of all, no one could call my number. This means I'm completely unreachable, and I can't reach anyone... including my daughter at school today, as her phone is with Optus as well.

The issues go as far as affecting Melbourne's rail network, taking it offline... leaving thousands of Australias, myself included, wondering why a rail network is reliant on cellular data connectivity. A number of hospitals and other health-related services are also offline right now through the Optus outage, with thousands and thousands of Australian businesses that have also been ripped offline by Optus. Uber Surge charges are also going up, while Uber drivers using Optus connections for their smartphones are unable to work throughout the outage.

An Optus spokesperson said: "We reiterate our apology to customers for the nationwide service outage that has occurred this morning. Some services across fixed and mobile are now gradually being restored. This may take a few hours for all services to recover and different services may restore at different sites over that time".