The Australian telco says it has ‘noticed a significant decline in the number of customers impacted’
[SINGAPORE] Some 120,000 users of Optus experienced mobile service disruptions in Australia on Monday (Feb 9).
Optus, a subsidiary of telco giant Singtel , said that it is aware of the issue and advised customers to restart their phone to restore service if they see “No Service” or “SOS” on their devices, Australian news outlet Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported.
The telco added that customers were, however, able to make emergency calls.
Optus also said that it was working with its partner Ericsson and had “noticed a significant decline in the number of customers impacted”.
ABC reported that 220,000 customers were initially affected by the outage, but that the number has since fallen to 115,000. The news outlet also reported that Optus was unsure about what caused the outage.
The Business Times has reached out to Singtel for comment.
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Monday’s outage came on the heels of a technical failure last September, which lasted almost 14 hours and resulted in the deaths of two people, said an independent report prepared for the company’s board in December.
The two had attempted to make emergency calls during the technical failure, which disrupted those calls. More than 600 people were unable to reach the police, the fire department and ambulance services.
In an interview with ABC released on Oct 6, 2025, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong expressed his condolences over the deaths.
He said in the same interview: “As far as Singapore is concerned, while we may be a shareholder through Temasek, we have always operated on a very clear cardinal principle – that we do not get involved in commercial operations. We do not direct commercial matters.”
In a media briefing in November, Singtel’s group chief executive Yuen Kuan Moon acknowledged that Optus would need to rebuild trust with customers – particularly after the “triple-zero incident”.
Triple zero (000) is Australia’s primary, free emergency telephone number for police, fire, or ambulance services, available round the clock from any phone.
Yuen had said then that the Optus board was “fully behind” the telco’s management in accelerating the transformation, focusing on risk management and improving resiliency.
“This is something that we continue to do and emphasise, because we believe Optus continues to be a very important service provider in Australia,” he had said, noting that Optus supported 10 million mobile customers in the country.
Shares of Singtel ended Monday 1.3 per cent or S$0.06 higher at S$4.78.
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