Optus outage attributed to hardware failure at exchange

A hardware failure at an Optus exchange in Victoria is being blamed for an Optus voice outage on Friday that triggered welfare checks by authorities in three states.

The outage, which Optus said lasted for about one hour and 16 minutes, impacted customers in parts of Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

The outage impacted the ability of customers to connect to triple zero services, although the telco said that welfare checks by policing authorities had uncovered “no adverse outcomes” as a result.

Police in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia are understood to have conducted welfare checks.

“We have been advised that those checks have now been completed with no adverse outcomes reported,” an Optus spokesperson said.

“We sincerely apologise to customers for the disruption.”

A Victoria Police spokesperson said it completed “around 40 welfare checks on impacted callers” with “no adverse outcomes or issues of note.”

Optus attributed the outage to an unspecified hardware issue at an exchange. The affected hardware had since been replaced.

It’s understood that during the outage, around 190,000 customers had two call attempts that did not connect to the intended recipient.

Optus advised that some customers were able to successfully complete a subsequent call attempt.

It's not yet clear to what extent triple zero camp-on operated during the outage, which enables emergency calls to be carried by healthy infrastructure operated by a rival telco.

Triple zero emergency calling has been under the spotlight since a September 2025 outage that also impacted Optus users, which has triggered a senate inquiry, a legislative review, and a federal court case.

Telstra has similarly experienced recent telecommunications outages that impacted emergency calling, notably a nationwide mobile outage in July.