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

The ABC understands vandalism is behind the Optus outage impacting more than 14,000 customers south-east of Melbourne.

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 southeast of Melbourne in the Frankston

00:15and Mornington Peninsula areas and we know that it may be difficult for them to reach emergency

00:21services unless they are covered by another mobile network in that coverage area or they're able to

00:27call emergency services through wi-fi. Now the issue here is that there's been an aerial fibre break

00:34Optus tells us and they're investigating that now and it's affecting mobile voice and mobile data

00:40services and it's unclear how long this issue will take to resolve but Optus says it will update

00:47customers on any significant changes as soon as possible or at least within six hours. Now we

00:53have heard from a resident who spoke on ABC Radio Melbourne he's in Berwick which is actually just

00:59outside of that outage area and he said he was also impacted at about 9.30 he lost access to the

01:06internet for about 15 minutes and that's since been restored. Now this all comes of course two months

01:13after a major Optus outage which has been linked to the deaths of two people in Western Australia and

01:20South Australia and that prompted a senate inquiry into our triple zero service and into telcos. Now

01:29Optus senior leaders appeared at the senate inquiry earlier this month apologising for the outage.

01:35The Optus chief executive Stephen Rue also spoke earlier this month saying that he apologised and that

01:43the telco had implemented a number of changes since that outage and those include daily triple zero

01:50tests calls protocols protocols to check triple zero connectivity during upgrades and plans to move

01:56its call centre from the Philippines back to Australia and Optus is also undergoing an independent

02:03review into technical failures and those results are meant to be released by the end of this year.