Overview
- A technical fault on Optus’s mobile network began around 1:30pm on Friday and lasted about 76 minutes, causing intermittent voice dropouts across parts of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
- Triple Zero Victoria received records from Optus showing 39–41 calls that had trouble connecting to the Telstra-run national 000 operator during the outage.
- Victoria Police carried out roughly 40 welfare checks on callers identified from Optus call logs and reported no adverse outcomes or issues of note following those checks.
- Optus apologised, said it identified the fault within minutes and mobilised technical teams to restore services, while federal ministers have opened investigations into the incident.
- The outage adds to a string of recent failures at major telcos that have previously left people unable to reach emergency services and led regulators to pursue legal action and push for stronger rules on network resilience.