- Latest outage: nine failed 000 calls in Dapto (pop. ~4,500) between 03:00 and 12:20; services later restored.
- Ministers to meet Optus and parent Singtel as ACMA’s probe into the 18 Sept failure continues.
What happened: Tower fault days after major 000 failure
Telecoms.com reports Optus is “looking into an issue” at a tower in Dapto, south of Wollongong, that blocked some calls including Triple Zero on Sunday morning. Police conducted welfare checks after nine failed 000 calls; Optus says all affected callers were ultimately accounted for.
Additional reports say the tower serves roughly 4,500 people and that service was restored by early afternoon. Canberra has called the repeat failure “unacceptable”, with the Communications Minister due to meet Optus and Singtel leadership. See for detail on the latest incident and the ongoing investigation into the 18 September outage that blocked hundreds of emergency calls across multiple states.
Also read: Optus partners with Nokia to deploy cloud-native 5G voice services
Also read: Optus-led LEO project takes aim at Australia’s satellite autonomy
Why it’s important
Emergency calling is the most safety-critical function a telco provides. A second failure within weeks raises questions about engineering change control, redundancy paths for 000, and whether incident communications meet new rules designed to tighten outage responses after Optus’s 2023 nationwide failure. ACMA has already opened a compliance investigation into the 18 September event; tougher consumer-protection settings were introduced earlier this year, reflecting lessons from past outages and penalties.
For customers, the immediate concern is resilience: will fall-back routing, alarms and real-time notifications prevent repeats? For Optus and Singtel, the test will be transparency and measurable fixes—root-cause publication, change-freeze discipline, and audited drills. For government, a broader review of the 000 ecosystem may yet be on the table if investigations find systemic gaps beyond a single operator. Until then, scrutiny will focus on timelines, communications, and whether promised safeguards translate into fewer missed calls when it matters most.
