Optus parent Singtel declared the end of a major outage was in sight, after much of its Australian unit’s mobile and broadband services went down in the early hours of the morning today (8 November).

The Singaporean operator issued a stock market update explaining disruption spanned all of Australia and its local unit had apologised to customers.

It added engineers had almost completed work to bring Optus’ fixed and mobile networks back online.

Various news outlets quoted Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin as having rejected speculation the operator had suffered another cyberattack, with the executive reportedly blaming a technical issue for the outage.

The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reported the outage began at 4am local time and had been resolved by around 6pm.

But it noted around 10 million customers had been affected, including hospitals and government departments, with fixed-line calls to emergency services also impacted.

SMH added the outage hiked pressure on Bayer Rosmarin to resign and led to “long queues” of Optus customers outside the stores of rival operators Telstra and Vodafone Australia as they looked to change service provider.