Optus is in the hot seat once again, as another nationwide outage has sparked a troubling failure to connect emergency calls to triple-0. Four calls to emergency services couldn\u2019t get through during the outage, which lasted a mere 20 minutes but caused a huge stir. This is the second such incident in just a few months. With lives potentially at risk, is Optus doing enough to fix these recurring issues?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Monday morning, Optus customers across Australia were hit with a nationwide outage starting at around 8 am. While the issue was resolved quickly, within 20 minutes, the fallout was immediate. Four calls to triple-0, Australia\u2019s emergency services number, failed to connect. Luckily, no one was hurt, but the risk posed by these interruptions is significant, especially when you consider how close the country came to losing lives during a similar incident just last September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the September outage, hundreds of emergency calls couldn\u2019t reach triple-0, and tragically, two people died because of this failure. After that event, investigations revealed \u201csystemic and widespread issues<\/em>\u201d with Optus\u2019 network. Some mobile phones, particularly older models, were found to not automatically default to other networks during outages, preventing emergency calls. It\u2019s unsettling that the same issue is cropping up again, just months later, explains Yahoo Finance<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n