Tens of thousands of Optus customers have been impacted by a service outage which authorities suspect may be linked to the vandalism of a telecommunications tower.<\/p>\n
NSW Police received a report on Wednesday afternoon that a telecommunications tower on Maitland Road in Hexham in the NSW Hunter region, had been impacted by malicious damage.<\/p>\n
An Optus spokesperson said the outage may have impacted customers connecting to triple-0.<\/p>\n
They said mobile voice and mobile data services were also impacted.<\/p>\n
The outage affected customers in the Port Stephens and Maitland areas.<\/p>\n
The ABC understands about 34,000 customers have been impacted.<\/p>\n
Optus said services had been restored to all impacted areas and the network would continue to be monitored.<\/p>\n
Welfare checks underway<\/p>\n
Welfare checks are underway in relation to failed attempts to connect to triple-0.<\/p>\n
In a statement, a spokesperson for federal Communications Minister Anika Wells said the minister’s office, the department and ACMA had been notified.<\/p>\n
“The situation is being closely monitored.<\/p>\n
“Optus must work to rectify the situation as quickly as possible and keep customers informed,” the statement said.<\/p>\n
The damage to the tower is believed to have occurred about 9:30am.<\/p>\n
Police are urging anyone with information or dashcam footage from the area at the time to contact Crime Stoppers.<\/p>\n
Optus urged to ‘speak to Australians’<\/p>\n
The federal opposition said a statement provided by Optus on its website lacked critical transparency<\/p>\n
Shadow Communications Minister Melissa McIntosh said the head of Optus, CEO Stephen Rue, needed to be up-front about the current situation.<\/p>\n
“Come and speak to Australians and give them the confidence that they need that your network is going to provide the services that you promise,” she said.<\/p>\n
“How are Australians going to have that confidence that they can make those triple-0 calls?”<\/p>\n
Ms McIntosh wanted the government to establish an independent website that documents all telecommunication outages.<\/p>\n
“I want a thorough investigation into the whole ecosystem, including the infrastructure that is in place, including whether it’s fit for purpose, so these sorts of outages don’t happen,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tens of thousands of Optus customers have been impacted by a service outage which authorities suspect may be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99,154737,16609,51602,154736],"class_list":["post-264178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-hexham","tag-optus","tag-phone-outage","tag-telecommunications-outage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}