Looks like retail businesses are falling back on cash payments with customers:

    “We are taking cash and do have a backup eftpos, but it’s 3G. We are just trying
     to band-aid the situation. In this economy, every bit helps. [It’s] the good old
     saying, ‘cash is king’.”

This might give pause to people wanting a cash free economy. ;)

This impacted home and mobile internet as well as telephone systems. It also had ripple on effects. Optus was the backup communication provider for the Melbourne metro. The metro’s main communication system was down in the morning and they had no backup available causing chaos on the train network.

We were lucky our home internet is not with Optus but some colleagues were out of contact until 3 in the arvo.

I wonder what procedures Optus had in place to even contact their on call engineers in such a wide spread outage.

I wonder if they even plan for that at all or if the first few hours were a scramble just to get in contact with the right people.