Dozens of Triple Zero calls are believed to have been impacted by an Optus network outage across several Australian states and territories, just months after a major Telstra failure caused widespread disruption.<\/p>\n
Optus confirmed its latest outage lasted for just over an hour on Friday afternoon, affecting customers across parts of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.<\/p>\n
Police are now carrying out welfare checks after more than 39 callers experienced difficulties connecting to the emergency service during the outage.<\/p>\n
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By continuing you agree to our Terms<\/a> and Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n The incident is the latest to raise concerns about the reliability of Australia\u2019s telecommunications networks and access to Triple Zero during major disruptions.<\/p>\n Both Optus and Telstra have suffered serious network outages over the past 18 months that have left hundreds of Australians struggling to contact emergency services.<\/p>\n In July, trust in Telstra was rocked after a widespread national outage disrupted transport networks, businesses, health services and emergency calls.<\/p>\n The failure affected a network powering about 25 million Australian mobile services and marked Telstra\u2019s third major national outage in less than a year.<\/p>\n A critical software fault was blamed for the disruption, which halted train lines and caused business transactions to time out.<\/p>\n The outage also forced Telstra to conduct 639 welfare checks on people who had attempted to call Triple Zero, with seven requiring assistance after initially failing to get through.<\/p>\n Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady apologised following the outage and vowed to determine what went wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will complete our investigation into the actions needed to prevent it from happening again. You have my commitment on that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Communications Minister Anika Wells also pledged to \u201chold Telstra\u2019s feet to the fire\u201d, arguing the company\u2019s response to the disruption had not been good enough.<\/p>\n The July failure came less than a year after a major Optus network outage lasting almost 14 hours left hundreds of people unable to reach Triple Zero and was linked to two deaths.<\/p>\n The repeated failures have increased scrutiny on how Australia\u2019s major telcos handle emergency calls when their networks go down.<\/p>\n Telcos have since issued fresh advice explaining what Australians should do if they cannot connect to Triple Zero during a network outage.<\/p>\n If a phone attempts to make an emergency call using its own mobile network but cannot connect, the device should automatically try to use another available network.<\/p>\n If the first call fails, users are being urged to try again and remain on the line for up to a minute while their phone searches for an alternative network.<\/p>\n This may result in silence on the line while the device attempts to establish a connection.<\/p>\n The Federal Government has also strengthened regulatory powers following previous Triple Zero failures, with telcos facing greater scrutiny and potential civil penalties over their handling of emergency services.<\/p>\n Telecommunications experts have argued the repeated outages highlight broader problems with Australia\u2019s regulatory framework.<\/p>\n RMIT telecommunications expert Mark Gregory previously called for Australia\u2019s telecommunications laws to be rebuilt \u201cstructurally from the ground up and in tune with the modern era\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to start again,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve seen piecemeal changes being made to the telecommunications legislation and to the regulations.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we need to do is to rebuild the Telecommunications Act, the legislation and the regulations, and to make them fit for purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dozens of Triple Zero calls are believed to have been impacted by an Optus network outage across several…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":888725,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-888724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888724","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=888724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/888725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}