Australia’s Optus apologises for outage that disrupted emergency calls

[SYDNEY] Optus, Australia’s No 2 telecom carrier, on Saturday (Sep 12) apologised a day after an outage on its network affected users across three states and disrupted some emergency services calls.

The 76-minute technical glitch on Friday affected Optus voice calling services in parts of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania states and the Northern Territory, with “some customers experienced intermittent call dropouts”, Optus said in a statement.

“We sincerely apologise to customers for the disruption,” the statement said.

The outage follows an Optus network issue last year that left hundreds of people unable to contact police, fire and ambulance services and resulted in two deaths.

Chris Bowen, a senior minister in the country’s centre-left government, said it was “deeply concerning” that another outage had hit Optus customers.

“All the necessary investigations have begun,” Bowen said in televised remarks. “It’s an obligation on our telecommunications companies to keep all their technology for triple-0 calls in the best possible working order.”

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Police in Victoria said they completed around 40 welfare checks on callers hit by Friday’s outage.

“There were no adverse outcomes or issues of note,” a police spokesperson said in a statement.

In 2024, Optus, owned by Singtel, was fined A$12 million (US$8.6 million) by regulators for failing to provide emergency call services to thousands during a nationwide outage in 2023. Optus also suffered a cyberattack in 2022 that affected the data of around 9.5 million Australians. REUTERS