Optus has suffered another Triple Zero outage, with almost 5,000 customers in the Illawarra region of NSW affected on Sunday.

At least nine Triple Zero calls from the Dapto area failed to reach emergency services. This forced one person requiring an ambulance to use a non-Optus phone to seek help, while another person forwent emergency assistance altogether due to the outage. NSW Police conducted welfare checks for four other callers and also checked on another individual who unsuccessfully attempted to contact emergency services. Additionally, two callers mistakenly dialed Triple Zero during the incident.

The issue involved a mobile phone tower in the Dapto area, affecting calls between 3:00 am and 12:20 pm on Sunday. “We have investigated the impact of the issue and have confirmed with police that all callers who attempted to contact emergency services are okay,” an Optus spokesperson said. The company also issued a sincere apology to any customers who were impacted.

Optus has not yet identified the cause of the outage.

This incident comes as the telco continues to deal with the fallout from its catastrophic Triple Zero outage earlier this month, which affected customers across South Australia and Western Australia and has been linked to three deaths.

Optus is bracing for a wave of customer losses and long-lasting damage to its reputation. Industry insiders warn that the telco’s credibility has been severely damaged and its governance failures exposed.

Chief Executive Stephen Rue has blamed human error by staff in Australia and India for the process breakdown. He explained that network engineers failed to follow key steps that had been undertaken during similar upgrades in the past.

To be very clear: Optus is accountable for the operations of its network.
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