A simple software upgrade went wrong. Across the country economic life ground to a halt. Groceries were abandoned at supermarket checkouts. Commerce was paralysed as the nation waited for its payment system to be brought back on line.
The Optus outage lingers fresh in our minds yet the scene described here is not Melbourne or Sydney in November 2023, but Zimbabwe four years ago when the southern African nation suffered a 72-hour outage of the mobile money service known as Ecocash.
