‘Significant’: telco giant Optus probing fresh outage

A major Optus outage is affecting emergency service calls for more than 14,000 people.

The issue stems from an aerial fiber break affecting users in the Frankston and Mornington Peninsula areas south-east of Melbourne.

The embattled telco said it was investigating the issue affecting triple zero calls.

“Optus customers will only be able to call Emergency Services if they are within range of another mobile network or can make calls over Wi-Fi,” the company said on its website.

The failure is the fourth time in as many months that a major Optus outage has prevented people from accessing emergency services.

A planned firewall upgrade in South Australia led to a communications outage linked to the deaths of three Australians on September 18.

Optus CEO Stephen Rue blamed human error as the cause of this error.

Normal calls were largely unaffected, but the outage prevented around 600 triple zero calls from being connected to emergency services.