Optus has suffered another Triple Zero outage, with almost 5,000 customers in the Illawarra region of New South Wales affected on Sunday.
At least nine Triple Zero calls from the Dapto area failed to reach emergency services. This disruption forced one person requiring an ambulance to use a non-Optus phone to make the call, while another individual forwent emergency assistance due to the outage.
NSW Police conducted welfare checks for four other callers and also checked on another person who unsuccessfully attempted to reach emergency services. Additionally, two other callers accidentally dialed Triple Zero during the incident.
The issue involved a mobile phone tower in the Dapto area and affected calls between 3:00 am and 12:20 pm on Sunday.
“We have investigated the impact of the issue and have confirmed with police that all callers who attempted to contact emergency services are OK,” an Optus spokesperson said. “We sincerely apologise to any customers who were impacted.”
Optus has yet to identify the cause of the outage.
This outage comes as the telco continues to grapple with the fallout from its catastrophic Triple Zero outage earlier this month, which affected customers across South Australia and Western Australia and has been linked to three deaths.
Optus is bracing for a wave of customer losses and long-lasting reputation damage after the earlier outage. Industry insiders warn that the telco’s credibility has been severely damaged and its governance failures exposed.
Chief Executive Stephen Rue has blamed human error by staff in both Australia and India for the process breakdown. He found that network engineers did not follow key steps that were undertaken during similar upgrades in the past.
To be very clear: Optus is accountable for the operations of its network.
https://www.watoday.com.au/technology/optus-hit-with-triple-zero-outage-in-nsw-20250929-p5myk7.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_technology
