• Optus apologised after a 76-minute outage disrupted some voice and emergency calls across four Australian jurisdictions
  • Victoria Police completed around 40 welfare checks with no adverse outcomes, while the cause of the outage remains under investigation

The fact

Optus apologised on 12 September after a 76-minute voice-service outage the previous afternoon disrupted some calls in Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Some emergency calls also failed to connect.

Triple Zero Victoria said Optus provided details of around 40 calls that had difficulty reaching Telstra's national Triple Zero operator. Victoria Police completed welfare checks on the affected callers and reported no adverse outcomes. Those checks relate to Victoria and should not be treated as a complete count of affected calls across all four jurisdictions.

Optus said its monitoring systems detected the problem within minutes and technical teams began restoring services while escalation procedures were activated. The cause remains under investigation. The incident follows earlier scrutiny of Optus's emergency-call procedures. In 2024, the ACMA imposed penalties of more than A$12 million over the company's 2023 outage, including failures involving emergency-call access and 369 welfare checks. Those findings concern the earlier outage, not Friday's incident.

The assessment

When an outage affects Triple Zero, restoring the network is only part of the job. The operator also has to work out which emergency calls failed and make sure those callers are checked on. In this case, Optus restored service after 76 minutes, while police later carried out around 40 welfare checks in Victoria.

That follow-up only works if Optus can identify the failed calls and pass accurate information to emergency services quickly. Victoria Police said none of the welfare checks found an adverse outcome, which is reassuring. But the cause of the outage is still being investigated, and it is not yet clear how many emergency calls were affected outside Victoria.

For BTW readers, restoration time does not tell the whole story. Operators also need to show what happened to calls that failed during an outage, how quickly those callers were identified and whether the right information reached emergency services in time.

What to watch

Watch for Optus's incident report and any regulatory response. It should explain what caused the outage, how many emergency calls were affected across all four jurisdictions, when caller details were passed to authorities and whether any changes are being made to the network or the welfare-check process.