Optus apologises for outage in New South Wales’ Illawarra region

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Optus has apologised for a second service outage in less than two weeks, this time affecting a mobile tower in the New South Wales Illawarra region. The outage affected calls between 3 am and 12:20pm including calls to the triple-zero emergency network.

Transcript

00:00Optus has this morning revealed there was a fault at a mobile tower here in Dapdo which caused an

00:07outage of its mobile service between 3 a.m. and 12.20 p.m. on Sunday. It said it affected around

00:154,500 locals who used the service provider as well as nine triple zero calls. The telco said

00:23of those callers one who needed an ambulance was able to use another service provider. Four failed

00:30calls triggered welfare checks by police and they did not need any further emergency service help

00:37and the rest of those calls they were either accidental or those people were safe. Locals

00:43on social media have reported major disruptions at the local shopping mall behind me as businesses

00:49were unable to make calls or access the internet. We spoke to a few of those locals here today.

00:55I wasn't able to call anybody so my sister was in Wollongong and we weren't able to contact her

01:00about how she needed when she needed to be picked up or anything which was a bit of an issue. It's

01:05very disappointing to see that that's happened multiple times in such a short span and even

01:10since I've been in Australia I've heard it from I think it was like Telstra at one point down south

01:15I've heard of a couple of other outages and it's just I don't know if it's an infrastructure issue

01:21or if it's a like a company-wide issue but and it really should be addressed and made more secure.

01:27Service has now been restored however Optus has issued an apology for this outage in a statement.

01:33This is the second major outage in less than two weeks. It follows a failed firewall update which

01:40has blocked 600 emergency calls and is now being linked to the deaths of three people in other

01:46states. The Australian Communications and Media Authority has launched an investigation into that

01:52matter. We've heard from the federal member for Whitlam Carol Berry who has asked Optus for a more

01:57detailed timeline as to how this outage occurred. Meanwhile New South Wales Health Minister and

02:02Minister for the Illawarra Ryan Park has said that his government are investigating the matter.

02:08He said it is very concerning and that his government are working to double check on each

02:14of those triple zero callers to check that they really are okay. He said while the consequences of

02:19this outage aren't as serious as the ones seen a few weeks ago he said that this does not minimize

02:27the seriousness of this situation. He's called on this outage to be included in the communication

02:33regulator's investigation to see whether there are any potential links.

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