Australia Pushes for Stronger Telecom Networks After Optus Outage

Australia's government has said it will work to strengthen the resilience of the country's telecommunications networks following a fresh outage at Optus, the nation's second-largest carrier, which affected users across three states and the Northern Territory and disrupted some emergency services calls.

The disruption on Friday lasted 76 minutes, according to Optus, and hit voice calling services in parts of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Some customers experienced intermittent call dropouts, the company said.

Optus apologised for the glitch on Saturday. The centre-left government described the incident as deeply concerning and said it was under investigation.

Asked about the outage on Sunday, Communications Minister Anika Wells said no piece of infrastructure, whether roads, bridges, poles or wires, is fully resilient. She said the priority was to make these systems as resilient as possible.

The latest incident follows a network issue at Optus last year that left hundreds of people unable to reach police, fire and ambulance services, and resulted in two deaths.

In 2024, regulators fined Optus A$12 million for failing to provide emergency call services to thousands of users during a nationwide outage in 2023. The company, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, also suffered a cyberattack in 2022 that affected the data of around 9.5 million Australians.