Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecommunications carrier, apologized for a 76-minute technical glitch on September 11 that disrupted voice calling — including some emergency-services calls — across Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, Reuters reported.
The outage follows a 2025 Optus emergency-calling failure that resulted in two deaths, drawing renewed government scrutiny of telecom resilience as a form of critical infrastructure.
Why it matters: Repeated emergency-calling failures at a major national carrier underscore why telecom networks are increasingly treated as critical infrastructure in their own right, subject to resilience and redundancy requirements comparable to power and water utilities, rather than purely commercial service-quality standards.
Source: Reuters, September 12, 2026.
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