UPDATED 8.50am (AEDT) 19/02/2021

A widespread Optus outage caused plenty of frustration on Thursday, with reports of customers losing access to the internet and mobile phone services.

Optus customers in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland complained the telecommunication service was down, leaving many unable to complete work or meet deadlines.

According to the down detector website, customers began reporting Optus outages at 6.44am on Thursday.

By 2pm, the telco issued a tweet claiming to have “resolved” the outage, however customers responded advising they were still experiencing issues.

To make matters worse, some ANZ payment terminals also stopped working around the country, with the ANZ bank admitting to “intermittent issues” with its system.

The first reports of an ANZ outage were filed by 6.53am, with no resolution confirmed as at 3pm.

As a result of the ANZ payment terminal outage, no cards were working on these machines – Visa, Mastercard, AMEX or Eftpos – with furious customers taking to Twitter demanding to know when the matter would be resolved.

“.@ANZ_AU Honestly, your trading platform is hands down _the worst_ I have ever come across,” user Cameron Smith said, including a screenshot from the bank’s website.

Tweet from @CameronSmith93

“We’re sorry for the trouble. We’re currently having intermittent issues with EFTPOS system & the team is trying to fix it ASAP,” ANZ responded to queries.

Tweet from @ANZ_AU

A spokesperson for Eftpos later advised The New Daily this was not an Eftpos outage, contrary to earlier reports, as only ANZ terminals were experiencing the issue.

Meanwhile, Optus customers unable to access the internet during work hours were also fuming, with one Twitter user asking the provider to supply a letter to prove he was unable to complete an online exam.

Another user was particularly unhappy with the lack of customer service he received, expressing disappointment that he had not been informed of the outage by Optus directly.

“For a business customer of Optus, it’s sad when I have to go to Twitter to see if there is an outage based on the number of people tweeting ‘Is Optus down?” he wrote.

Tweet from @angryeti

Optus updated that status of the outage to ‘resolved’ on Thursday afternoon, but customers responded advising they were still having the same issues connecting to the service.

“RESOLVED: We can confirm the fault which earlier resulted in some Optus customer experiencing intermittent disruptions to their mobile call, text and data services, has been resolved,” Optus tweeted.

Tweet from @BillyDiehm

To this tweet, one customer replied, “Sorry still having problems and been trying for 3 hours on your App for someone to help. No one wants to answer my questions.”

The New Daily understands the outages may have been connected, although the link has not been officially confirmed.

And all on the same day that Facebook threw a spanner in the works and blocked countless organisations – including news media outlets and some health and emergency services – from sharing content on its platform.

The New Daily included.

A chaotic day indeed for Australians in the modern age.