Multiple triple zero calls affected by another Optus outage

Multiple triple zero calls are believed to have been affected in an outage affecting Optus customers across parts of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

The network has confirmed the outage began around 1.30pm yesterday and lasted just over an hour.

Police conducted welfare checks and say there were no adverse outcomes for the 39 callers who experienced difficulties connecting to the emergency line.

“Yesterday afternoon, Optus resolved an issue that affected some customers’ voice calling services across parts of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory for approximately one hour and 16 minutes, during which some customers experienced intermittent call dropouts,” the telco said in a statement this morning.

“Optus identified the issue within minutes through its network monitoring systems and immediately mobilised technical teams to restore services while activating established escalation processes and engaging relevant stakeholders.

“We sincerely apologise to customers for the disruption.”

Both Optus and Telstra have reported a series of serious network outages in the last 18 months which have resulted in issues with hundreds of Australians trying to call Triple Zero.

At least three deaths were linked to a massive outage in September last year.

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Carol Bennett, the CEO of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network told Weekend TODAY the system was “set up to fail”.

“We’re seeing continuous outages, major outages affecting people’s lives and safety and this should not continue,” Bennett said.

“I think Aussies are reasonable in expecting that they don’t have a signal all the time.

“But even when you go somewhere without range, you can still make SOS calls... for Aussies not to be able to contact emergency services is just simply unacceptable.”

The Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation bill will be presented to parliament this week amid growing calls for mandated domestic roaming.

A narrow version of this function strictly limited to emergency calls already exists where if a phone attempts to connect to triple zero using its own mobile network but cannot, it will try to connect to another mobile network if available.

But callers may have to wait for up to a minute to allow the phone to attempt to connect to another network and there may be only silence on the line in that time.

“(Domestic roaming) would make a significant difference to people’s access to connectivity in general, but also their safety for exactly this kind of occurrence where the system doesn’t work and they can’t connect to Triple Zero, it’s a no brainer,” Bennett said.

“We should fix this.

“We’ve got the opportunity, we need to see our politicians pass this legislation that enables us to operate like other countries in the world, where they get access to whatever system is available to them when they need it.

“We also need this sector to operate like other essential services like energy and water in having reliability standards.

“The telcos should be accountable, they should be transparent to the public, they should be following the processes like other essential services that ensure that these sorts of outages don’t occur.”