Australia’s Optus suffers call outage, vandalism blamed

SYDNEY: Australian telco Optus said on Wednesday it had suffered a service outage near Melbourne impacting around 14,000 users, two months after a disruption to emergency calls that probably caused four deaths when customers failed to get timely aid.

Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, initially warned that emergency services could be affected by the outage, but later said it was not aware of any failed emergency calls.