Optus has suffered another outage affecting calls to emergency services.
The telco estimates more than 14,000 customers around Frankston and the Mornington Peninsula, southeast of Melbourne, have been impacted by the outage on Wednesday morning.
“Calls to Emergency Services are impacted by this outage,” the Optus website reads.
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“Optus customers will only be able to call Emergency Services if they are within coverage of another mobile network or are able to call via WiFi.”
The telco said the outage to both mobile voice and data was caused by an “aerial fibre break” and is uncertain as to when it could be fixed.
The failure is the fourth time in months that a major Optus outage has prevented people accessing emergency services.
A scheduled firewall upgrade in South Australia triggered a communications outage on September 18 linked to the deaths of three Australians.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue blamed human error for that fault.
Normal calls were largely unaffected, but the outage blocked about 600 triple zero calls from connecting to emergency services.
Optus said services have now been restored after what it suspects was a “vandalism incident”.
“The incident occurred at a Telstra pit on the Mornington Peninsula where a fibre cable was cut,” Optus said.
“This matter has been reported to Victoria Police, and Optus is cooperating with authorities in their investigation.
“Importantly, triple-0 Victoria has confirmed they are not aware of any failed emergency calls during the outage. There was overlapping coverage in the affected areas from Optus and other networks.
“We understand the inconvenience this causes and thank customers for their patience.”
– With AAP
