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A MAJOR telecommunications fault shut down mobile and landline phone calls and internet connections in Queensland and some parts of New South Wales for at least four hours today.

Hospital services were hit, there were delays to flights at Brisbane Airport and businesses were reduced to a standstill. ATM and EFTPOS transactions were also affected.

The problem was first noticed at about 8am (AEST) and appeared to have been fixed in some areas by noon.

Were you affected?  Are your systems still groggy?  Let us know using the form below.

The Federal Government has been monitoring the outage and has been in talks with Optus.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said Optus had assured his office that they were rapidly restoring connections.

"My office has been in regular contact with Optus and they have advised that they are working as quickly as possible to restore all services," Mr Conroy said.

Optus this morning blamed a broken fibre optic cable on the Gold Coast for the widespread outages and said mobile phone services and all calls to and from fixed line numbers were affected.

The fault also disrupted internet access to servers outside Queensland from within the state.  Problems were also reported by customers in northern New South Wales and users on the 3 mobile network.

Queensland Health said hospitals in the Gold and Sunshine coasts, Townsville and the Wide Bay region were affected, but that emergency calls were not.

An Airservices Australia spokesman said there were delays at Brisbane Airport as no data was getting through to pilots from air traffic controllers. The backlog was expected to have been cleared by 1pm.

IT support companies said there was a second Optus network fault at Stanthorpe, southwest of Brisbane, that contributed to the outage.

Anger

Frustrated readers said their businesses ground to a halt today and some were counting the costs of lost trade and productivity with a view to claiming compensation from Optus. 

Jodie Tanner said her family`s hardware store in Brendale, north of Brisbane, had lost EFTPOS facilities at about 8.30am.

"Our customers are getting agitated because they have had to find other forms of payment and manual transactions are taking longer to process. I have had numerous customers leave our store this morning," she said.

Nick Behrens, Commerce Queensland state policy manager, said the cost to business was unknown at this stage.

“Business is very much reliant on telecommunications and this creates a real inconvenience as many more things have to be done manually and often staff have not been trained to do this,” he said. 

“It also affects businesses trying to contact customers and in places like hospitals, where they use mobile phones to page doctors, it has caused a significant disturbance.”

One NEWS.com.au reader who claimed to work for the immigration department said "urgent stuff... like citizenship tests or visa payments" could not be processed.  

Others complained about the personal toll of the outage. 

"My wife just lost her mother and I am unable to call her to check how she is going. She is very upset and feels isolated," one reader said.

Earlier today Optus issued the statement: "At approximately 8.00am (AEST) this morning, a fibre optic cable was broken on the Gold Coast which affected services in Queensland.  We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused our customers."

The company did not reveal the cause of the cable damage.

A spokesperson for Telstra said the problem was confined to the Optus network.

"It is 100 per cent an Optus issue... They own the hardware and cable," a spokesperson told AAP.

Optus last year said it had more than 7 million mobile customers in Australia, but would not say today how many customers it had in Queensland. 

At least one of our readers saw an upside amid the chaos caused by the outage. 

"I work in a banking call centre where I usually have abusive obnoxious people all day," they said.

"Today is silence. Live it up!"

With Sean Plambeck and Mark Schliebs

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