It’s not been a fantastic past few months for Optus, which has seen its telco suffer outages that have become so frequent, customers must be left asking “why”.
While any network can go down for whatever reason, a major outage in September of 2025 at Optus even saw calls to emergency fail, a problem that resulted in tragedy for at least three individuals.
Now, not even six months later, Optus has seen another outage this week, running from February 9 through to February 10, with the telco now advising customers to basically turn their phones off and on again.
What began on the afternoon of February 9 and basically saw customers apparently affected by a software issue with no service on devices has continued slightly, with Optus noting that “over 35,000 customers remain impacted” because they have “not yet restarted their device”.
According to the telco, a restart “will restore their service immediately”, though has not specified why this is the case, and what exactly has happened (Pickr has asked).
While there’s little to no reason why someone shouldn’t restart their phones — and it’s good hygiene to do this regularly anyway — it’s also entirely possible that switching your phone to flight mode and switching flight mode off could do the same thing.
A representative for Optus couldn’t say whether the flight mode toggle would fix the problem, though if you are an Optus customer and are for some reason reluctant to power down, you might want to try this.
