(Reuters, Sydney) Australian telecommunications company Optus experienced an emergency call service disruption near Melbourne, affecting approximately 14,000 customers. A company spokesperson said the outage was caused by sabotage.
Optus is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel in Australia. A statement published on Optus' website on Wednesday (November 26) said a broken overhead fiber optic cable was likely the cause of the outage.
The statement said, "Customers can only call for emergency services when they are within coverage of other mobile networks or making calls via Wi-Fi."
Optus spokesperson McNamara told ABC Melbourne radio at 11:00 am (8:00 am Singapore time) that the outage was caused by sabotage and is currently under investigation.
She said Optus has photographic evidence that the company's cables were cut. "We know that copper wires in a conduit have been removed and we have contacted Victoria Police."
Further Reading
Reuters reported that emergency call services were restored at approximately 11:20 a.m. local time.
Two months ago, Altos experienced a much larger network outage in which three users died because they were unable to contact emergency services in time via a hotline.
