SYDNEY, Sept 13 (Reuters) – Australia’s government pledged on Sunday to bolster resilience in the nation’s telecommunications networks after an outage at Optus, the country’s No. 2 carrier, impacted users in three states and disrupted some emergency services calls.
The 76-minute technical glitch on Friday affected Optus voice calling services in parts of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania states and the Northern Territory, with some customers experiencing “intermittent call dropouts”, according to Optus.
It followed an Optus network issue last year that left hundreds of people unable to contact police, fire and ambulance services and resulted in two deaths.
Asked on Sunday about the latest outage, Communications Minister Anika Wells said “no piece of infrastructure be it roads, bridges, poles, wires is 100% resilient”.
“What we need to do is make sure these systems are as resilient as we can possibly make them,” Wells said in televised remarks.
Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, on Saturday apologised for the glitch, which the centre-left government described as “deeply concerning” and said was being investigated.
In 2024, Optus was fined A$12 million by regulators for failing to provide emergency call services to thousands during a nationwide outage in 2023. Optus also suffered a cyberattack in 2022 that affected the data of around 9.5 million Australians.
(Reporting by Sam McKeith in Sydney; Editing by Kim Coghill)
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