Authorities are currently probing an incident of vandalism involving a mobile phone tower in the Hunter region of New South Wales. This act of sabotage is suspected to be linked to an Optus service disruption that could be affecting emergency triple zero calls.
The outage stems from a break in an underground fibre line, which has resulted in interruptions to both mobile voice and data services. The incident reportedly occurred on Maitland Road in Hexham, Newcastle, at approximately 9:30 this morning.
In response, police have established a crime scene and are urging the public to provide any dashcam footage that might assist in their investigation. They are particularly interested in footage from the area around the time of the incident.
Authorities are also conducting welfare checks throughout the Hunter region to determine if there were any unsuccessful attempts to reach emergency services due to the outage.
An Optus representative informed 9news.com.au that their technical team is actively working to address the fibre break, which is affecting customers in Port Stephens, Maitland, and nearby areas.
An Optus spokesperson told 9news.com.au its technicians were responding to a fibre break impacting customers in “Port Stephens, Maitland and surrounding areas”.
“Mobile voice and mobile data services are impacted,” the spokesperson said.
“The ability to connect to triple zero may be impacted for some.
“We have alerted emergency services and agencies, emergency call person (Telstra), and relevant government bodies and stakeholders.
“Optus technicians are onsite working to restore services as quickly as possible.
“We apologise to impacted customers and will continue to provide regular updates.”
The telecommunications company told affected customers in an email their team would endeavour to fix the problem in the next five hours.
It is understood customers were notified just after 1.30pm today.
“We’re sorry services are still disrupted by an outage,” Optus said.
”Calls to emergency services are impacted by this outage.
“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 wi-fi.”
Three customers who were unable to call the emergency line died.
Some customers have reported issues with accessing Optus services on outage website DownDetector.
