OPTUS suffered another outage that disrupted emergency calls, just as a delegation from parent company Singapore Telecommunications visits Australia this week to meet Communications Minister Anika Wells over fallout from earlier disruptions.
Optus continues to investigate the cause of a now-restored issue involving a mobile phone tower site in the Dapto area of New South Wales on Saturday, a spokesperson said.
The issue affected around 4,500 customers and calls made between 3 am and 12.20 pm, including some emergency calls. Dapto is about 97 km south of Sydney.
Optus has “confirmed with police, all callers who attempted to contact emergency services are OK,” the spokesperson said. “We sincerely apologise to any customers who were impacted.”
The snafu is the latest in a series of network issues that have outraged Australians – and become a reputational crisis for Australia’s second-biggest phone company, which accounts for half of parent SingTel’s revenue.
SingTel Group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon will attend this week’s meeting with Wells in Sydney, alongside Optus CEO Stephen Rue and Chairman John Arthur.
A Sep 18 Optus network outage prevented customers from calling emergency services, resulting in the deaths of four people and a warning that Optus likely faces major financial penalties.
The blunder came less than two years after a similar incident impacting millions of customers led to a A$12 million (S$10.2 million) fine and cost the job of Rue’s predecessor, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin. BLOOMBERG
