The Australian government has launched an investigation into the nationwide communications outage that left residents without access to the internet for 12 hours on Wednesday 9 November.

“It is critical that industry and governments take stock following large-scale outages, given no network is immune,” said communications minister Michelle Rowland, calling the failure “particularly concerning”. 

Optus said a “configuration issue” may have been the cause of the outage, and stressed there was no evidence of a cyber attack.

The outage disrupted countless services, including business transactions, phone lines used by emergency services and transport links such as train services in the state of Victoria.

The Federal Department of Education, the Royal Melbourne Hospital and CommBank were among the organisations affected by the outage. The failures also affected other providers that use the Optus network, including Amaysim, Aussie Broadband and Moose Mobile...