Optus is facing renewed pressure after a service outage interrupted triple zero calls in the hunter region yesterday. Police believe vandals cut critical wires, but some customers say regardless of the cause, they've had enough.
00:00A critical link in the communications system.
00:04Attacked by vandals, according to police.
00:07They say these wires were cut at a tower at Hexham in the NSW Hunter region yesterday.
00:13Optus says 34,000 people lost their service and 13 000 calls failed.
00:19Of those, Optus was able to reach four and confirm they were OK.
00:23Eight others were referred to NSW Police for welfare checks, while one was referred to Victoria Police.
00:29Only one customer needed an ambulance and made contact in another way.
00:34You know, as it stands today, it's not good enough and you can't have a situation where people feel that they can't call triple zero because lives will be lost if it continues.
00:42The outage was a major headache for businesses and residents.
00:46Look, we had all sorts of outages and just when you're trying to run a business, it makes things so difficult.
00:5024 hours, couldn't use my Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, I was struggling hard, eh?
00:54Optus declined to be interviewed but has again apologised to customers.
00:58This comes as Optus faces the Senate inquiry into an outage in September, during which three people died while trying to contact emergency services.
01:07The opposition now wants an independent investigation into the triple zero ecosystem and its infrastructure.
01:13And if it can happen in that location, how many more locations across the country could it happen in?
01:19And that's actually a bit of a security risk for our country, I think.
01:23The federal government says it's improving resilience in the system, but the repeated incidents have some Optus customers looking elsewhere.
01:30Being one of those customers that just hangs in there and pays the bill, but I'm certainly considering looking elsewhere at the moment.
01:36Under Commonwealth law, vandals could face up to two years in prison for impairing a communications network.
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