OPTUS customers have been left without email and internet access during two separate outages that affected the carrier's business and consumer divisions.

OptusNet consumer broadband and dial-up customers were left without internet access and email late yesterday following a power failure at one of the company's exchanges.
An Optus spokeswoman confirmed that its consumer customers were left without internet access for 30 minutes late yesterday.

The outage also disrupted OptusNet's email service which was not restored until around midnight.

"The issue was resolved within a few hours," the spokeswoman said.

The carrier's misfortunes continued this morning.

Optus business customers reported problems accessing their email early today after an equipment failure at a data centre in the inner-Sydney suburb of Ultimo which hosts some of the carrier's services.

An email distributed to Optus business customers said that an air-conditioning unit used to cool servers at the data centre failed prompting the site's manager's to shut down several servers.

The email's author wrote that web access and email services would be affected by the outage.

An Optus spokeswoman confirmed that an air-conditiong unit at the centre had failed. However she said the carrier was still investigating the impact of the Ultimo incident on its business customers.