More than 14,000 Optus customers lose service in Melbourne’s southeast

More than 14,000 Optus customers have lost service in Melbourne's southeast, with the telco warning calls to emergency services have been impacted.

Transcript

00:00More than 14,000 Optus customers are affected and this may impact their ability to reach

00:08emergency services. Now this is impacting Optus customers south east of Melbourne in

00:14the Frankston and Mornington Peninsula areas and we know that it may be difficult for them

00:20to reach emergency services unless they are covered by another mobile network in that

00:25coverage area or they're able to call emergency services through Wi-Fi. Now the issue here is

00:32that there's been an aerial fibre break Optus tells us and they're investigating that now

00:37and it's affecting mobile voice and mobile data services and it's unclear how long this

00:43issue will take to resolve but Optus says it will update customers on any significant changes

00:49as soon as possible or at least within six hours. Now we have heard from a resident who

00:55spoke on ABC Radio Melbourne. He's in Berwick which is actually just outside of that outage

01:00area and he said he was also impacted at about 9.30. He lost access to the internet for about 15 minutes

01:08and that's since been restored. Now this all comes of course two months after a major Optus outage which

01:16has been linked to the deaths of two people in Western Australia and South Australia and that

01:22prompted a Senate inquiry into our triple zero service and into telcos. Now Optus senior leaders

01:30appeared at the Senate inquiry earlier this month apologising for the outage. The Optus Chief Executive

01:36Stephen Rue also spoke earlier this month saying that he apologised and that the telco had implemented a

01:45number of changes since a number of changes since that outage and those include daily triple zero test

01:50calls, protocols to check triple zero connectivity during upgrades and plans to move its call centre

01:57from the Philippines back to Australia and Optus is also undergoing an independent review into technical

02:05analysis of failures and those results are meant to be released by the end of this year.