More than 14,000 Optus customers south-east of Melbourne have lost service, with the telco warning calls to emergency services have been impacted.

Approximately 14,096 services have been impacted in the Frankston and Mornington Peninsula areas. 

According to the Optus website, the issue has been caused by an “aerial fibre break” and is currently under investigation.

“Optus customers will only be able to call Emergency Services if they are within coverage of another mobile network or are able to call via wi-fi,” the Optus website said.

The ABC understands the cause of the infrastructure damage was vandalism.

Optus customer Warwick told ABC Radio Melbourne that his service in Berwick, a Melbourne suburb north-east of the reported outage area, was also interrupted for about 15 minutes this morning.

“I was actually sitting in the kitchen and I was doing something on the net and it dropped out,” he told the radio station at about 9:30am.

“I lost everything. But I rang because about as little as five minutes ago, all of a sudden everything came back on my phone. 

“I’ve got full bars, I’ve got wi-fi again.

“I’ve got everything else so I’m assuming — at least at this end of what was the outage — we’re okay. I don’t know whether people further down on the peninsula have got it or not but it’s come back here.”

Optus sign in front of a building

Optus has faced heavy criticism in recent months over its handling of multiple service outages. (ABC News: Daniel Irvine)

It comes following outages across the country in recent months, some of which cut off access to Triple Zero.

Optus is the subject of a Senate inquiry, following one such outage in September, which was linked to the deaths of two people who could not reach emergency services.

The telco drew additional scrutiny after it emerged it held 11 crisis meetings and waited almost a day before telling the government about the deaths. 

More Optus network Triple Zero failures

A woman was unable to call Triple Zero after robbers broke into her home while she was in the bedroom.

In November, Optus chief executive Stephen Rue told the senate inquiry that Optus had taken several steps to improve its processes since the major outage.

Those steps included daily Triple Zero test calls, protocols to check Triple Zero connectivity during upgrades, and plans to move its call centres for emergencies from Manila back onshore.

Optus has also commissioned an independent review into the technical failures, expected to be completed before the end of the year.

The ABC has contacted Optus for comment.

Asked about the problem said to have caused the outage, optical communications expert Bill Corcoran explained that Australia’s increasing demand for data meant an increased reliance on physical fibre optic connections.

“With the amount of data that we’re using on our mobile phones, what we need is fast connections that go from these mobile phone towers down into our network,” the Monash University lecturer said.

“The connection that got broken today is an aerial optical fibre. 

“A lot of our fibres are in the ground but sometimes it’s more convenient and more useful to put the cables along those powerlines you see in the street.”

Bill Corcoran

Bill Corcoran says any break in a fibre optic cable will need to be physically repaired on site. (ABC News)

Dr Corcoran said while all traffic — including emergency services calls — used the same infrastructure, there were usually fallbacks in place to prevent complete service blackouts.

“What tends to happen in order to avoid the situation that you’ve seen today is there tends to be some redundancy placed in networks, so that if one line goes down you can switch to a different line,” he said.

“What it seems like, in this case, is that hasn’t happened, which is a bit of a problem clearly.”

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