Optus suffers another outage that disrupted emergency calls ahead of Singtel visit
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A Singtel team, led by its CEO, is visiting Australia this week to meet its communications minister over fallout from earlier disruptions.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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SYDNEY - Optus suffered another outage on Sept 28 that disrupted emergency calls,
Optus continues to investigate the cause of a now-resolved issue involving a mobile phone tower site in the Dapto area of New South Wales, a spokesperson said.
The issue affected around 4,500 customers and calls made between 3am and 12.20pm, including some emergency calls. Dapto is about 95km south of Sydney.
Optus has “confirmed with police, all callers who attempted to contact emergency services are OK”, the spokesperson said. “We sincerely apologise to any customers who were impacted.”
The snafu is the latest in a series of network issues that have outraged Australians – and become a reputational crisis for the country’s second-biggest phone company, which accounts for half of parent Singtel’s revenue. An Optus network outage on Sept 18 prevented customers from calling the emergency triple zero number, resulting in the deaths of four people and a warning that Optus likely faces major financial penalties.
Singtel said in a statement on Sept 29 that the latest issue was “totally unrelated to last week’s triple zero incident. It is a different type of outage which was limited to one cell site out of 3,140 in New South Wales”.
“Given the heightened sensitivity in Australia around triple zero calls, Optus communicated this incident to demonstrate full transparency of a type of outage that carriers around the world routinely encounter,” Singtel said. “This incident did not arise from any upgrade or maintenance action being conducted.”
Australia’s Finance Minister Katy Gallagher earlier told national broadcaster ABC that news of the Sept 28 outage was “more disappointing news off the back of the major disruption that happened the week before”.
“I think there’re questions that Optus is going to have to answer about what happened in the last fortnight and their response to it,” she said.
Singtel shares tumbled on Sept 29 after news of the latest outage, falling as much as 3.8 per cent to $4.10, the most since May 13.
At the midday trading break, the stock was down 2.8 per cent, or 12 cents, to $4.14. It was the most heavily traded counter by value, with 28.3 million shares changing hands.
Singtel Group chief executive officer Yuen Kuan Moon will attend this week’s meeting with Ms Wells in Sydney, alongside Optus CEO Stephen Rue and chairman John Arthur.
The Sept 18 Optus network outage came less than two years after a similar incident impacting millions of customers led to a A$12 million (S$10 million) fine and cost the job of Mr Rue’s predecessor, Ms Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.
Last week, Optus announced details of an independent review that will probe the series of events that took place and determine why emergency calls did not connect.
The firm was also fined A$66 million last week for selling products to vulnerable customers between 2019 and 2023 that they did not need or want, leaving many in debt.
Singtel said last week that it has supported Optus by investing more than A$9.3 billion in the past five years, with a large proportion going towards building network infrastructure across Australia. BLOOMBERG, AFP
