Singtel Shares Fall as Australian Unit Optus Suffers Outage — Update

By Sherry Qin

Singapore Telecommunications' shares fell sharply early Wednesday after its Australian unit Optus said it has been hit by a large-scale outage.

Singtel fell as much as 5.2% in the early session and was recently down 4.4% at 2.37 Singapore dollars (US$1.75), on track for its largest daily loss since August.

Earlier in the day, Optus, Australia's second-largest mobile operator, said it has suffered a network outage that affected millions of its mobile customers, including emergency services, hospitals and transport systems.

"Optus has confirmed that services across both Optus' fixed and mobile networks are close to full restoration," Singtel said in a statement. "The rest of the services will be progressively restored," it added.

The outage is the second major incident at Optus in 14 months. Last year, Optus was hit by a cyberattack in which customer details were exposed, and for which Optus is facing a class action that alleges the company failed to protect customers' data.

Optus had 10.4 million mobile customers as of March 31, according to Singtel's most recent annual report. ASX-listed Telstra has more than 22 million mobile subscribers and TPG Telecom has about 5.3 million.

Write to Sherry Qin at sherry.qin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 08, 2023 00:36 ET (05:36 GMT)

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