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The latest incident follows the revelation earlier this month that four people affected by an Optus network outage had died after being cut off from emergency services
This week, Australian telco Optus has revealed that it has suffered yet another network outage, just weeks after a previous incident was revealed to have left hundreds of customers without access to emergency services.
The latest network incident impacted a tower in the Dapto area of New South Wales between 3:00am and 12:20pm, leaving customers unable to place calls, including to emergency services.
Optus said that they recorded nine failed calls to Triple Zero (the Australian emergency services number), resulting in welfare checkups by the operator and local police. Of these nine calls, one customer was in need of an ambulance and was ultimately able to contact the emergency services by other means.
All nine customers that attempted to contact the emergency services are “OK”, according to a statement from Optus.
“We sincerely apologise to any customers who were impacted,” said Optus.
Thankfully, this outage lasted a relatively short period of time and few customers; the same cannot be said of the outage reported earlier this month, which saw hundreds of customers cut off from emergency services South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia.
The incident saw 631 customers were unable to access Triple Zero, with around 480 of those unable to find alternative means of contacting the emergency services.
As a result, four people of the impacted customers unable to contact emergency services are known to have died.
“We are deeply sorry to learn about the network incident at our Optus subsidiary that has impacted Triple Zero calls, and to hear that customers could not connect to emergency services when they most needed them,” said Yuen Kuan Moon, CEO of Optus parent company Singtel. “Our hearts go out to the families and friends of those who have passed away and we know that Optus will get to the bottom of this matter.”
It appears that this outage was the result of a scheduled firewall upgrade. These upgrades are routine for all telcos, with customer traffic typically directed away from the affected portion of the core network with no ill effect on services. In this incidence, however, customers were not redirected, leaving them without access to critical emergency services.
The incident is currently under investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), with Optus itself conducting an independent probe.