Australia’s Optus suffers call outage, vandalism blamed

[SYDNEY] Australian telco Optus said on Wednesday it had suffered a service outage near Melbourne impacting around 14,000 users, two months after a disruption to emergency calls that probably caused four deaths when customers failed to get timely aid.

Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, initially warned that emergency services could be affected by the outage, but later said it was not aware of any failed emergency calls.

“Customers will only be able to call emergency services if they are within coverage of another mobile network or are able to call via WiFi,” the company said on its website on Wednesday morning.

SingTel said in a statement to Reuters on Thursday that investigations showed the outage was caused by vandals who cut a fibre cable in Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne.

Optus restored services by 11.20 am (1220 GMT) on Wednesday. REUTERS