Sydney, Sep 29 (UNI) Australia’s second-largest telecommunications company, Optus, on Monday reported a second network outage in 10 days that affected emergency calls.
Optus, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singaporean conglomerate Singtel, on Monday said that the service outage affected phone calls in the east coast state of New South Wales (NSW) between 3 a.m. and 12:20 p.m. local time on Sunday.
It said that nine calls to Australia’s national emergency number, Triple Zero, failed during the outage. Optus said that it has confirmed with police that all callers who attempted to contact Triple Zero are okay.
An estimated 4,500 customers were affected by the outage. Optus said it was caused by a problem with a mobile phone tower site. It marks the second Optus outage that affected emergency calls in 10 days.
The prior outage on September 18 caused around 600 calls to Triple Zero to fail and was linked to four deaths, including that of an eight-week-old infant.
Australia’s Minister for Communications, Anika Wells, said that Optus will face significant consequences for the Sept. 18 outage, which affected customers in central and western Australia.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority in November 2024 fined Optus 12 million Australian dollars (about 7.9 million U.S. dollars) for a nationwide network outage in November 2023, during which 2,145 people were unable to contact Triple Zero.
