By Duncan Evans
Copyright news
The supermarket has confirmed that 13 of its mobile customers were impacted by last month’s fatal triple-0 blackout.
The September 18 outage lasted for 13 hours and hit South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and NSW, knocking out about 600 triple-0 calls.
“Optus has confirmed that there were 13 Coles Mobile customers impacted last month, all of whom have received welfare checks from Optus or local state police,” a Coles spokesman told NewsWire on Thursday.
“We will continue to work closely with Optus as they conduct a review into the incident.”
The Coles Mobile product offers customers prepaid services on Optus and Telstra networks.
The outage, sparked by a scheduled firewall upgrade in South Australia, is linked to the deaths of three Australians.
The dramatic breakdown has continued, with Optus recording a second triple-0 blackout in Wollongong on the NSW south coast on Sunday.
An outage at an Optus mobile phone tower in the Wollongong suburb of Dapto knocked out triple-0 calls between 3am and 12.20pm.
On Tuesday, Optus claimed Swedish firm Ericsson was responsible for the Dapto failure, saying the company’s “equipment did not appear to operate as it should”.
“Initial assessments indicate that 5G services were operational at all times but 4G services were not, which prevented calls from connecting. Optus’ 5G does not currently carry voice services in Australia,” Optus said.
“Optus’ ability to detect the outage was impacted as the Ericsson equipment in the cell tower did not alarm that 4G services were not operational.
“At our request, Ericsson has undertaken a full health review of their elements of our network. This review found that what has occurred on this cell site is an anomaly they have not seen elsewhere.”
The Wollongong failure is not linked to any fatalities, but it sparked a fresh round of anger following the September 18 outage.
NSW Premier Chris Minns said the incident was “clearly unacceptable” and welcomed the federal government and ACMA’s investigations into the telco.
“NSW deserves full and transparent information from Optus about what went wrong yesterday, including when emergency services and the Telco Authority were notified,” he said on Monday.
“Our emergency services have worked tirelessly to check on the welfare of those affected by this outage, and that work will continue today.”
Pressure is now mounting on Optus, with Communications Minister Anika Wells flagging hefty new penalties for the failures.
This week, Yuen Kuan Moon, the boss of Optus parent company Singtel Group, flew into Australia for a meeting with Ms Wells along with Optus board chairman John Arthur and Optus chief executive Stephen Rue.
Speaking to reporters, Mr Yuen said the board “agreed that funding will be shared openly with everyone in due time”.
Mr Yuen said Mr Rue had been in the role for 11 months to “transform Optus” and to “address the issues we’ve had since 2022”.
“It is very early days, it takes time to transform a company,” he said. “(Mr Rue) is here to provide the solution.”
September’s triple-0 breakdowns are just the latest in a string of high-profile scandals for the troubled company.
In 2023, it suffered a triple-0 outage that impacted 2145 people.
Optus received a $12m penalty for that event and implemented 18 government recommendations to prevent any future outages.
And last month, Optus copped a $100m fine from the Federal Court for “appalling and predatory” sales tactics targeting vulnerable Australians from 2019 to 2023.
