Victoria Police conduct dozens of welfare checks following Optus outage
Posted Sat 12 Sep 2026 at 10:52amSat 12 Sep 2026 at 10:52amSat 12 Sep 2026 at 10:52am
Victoria Police has conducted dozens of welfare checks after an Optus outage yesterday left some callers struggling to get through to emergency services.
Triple Zero Victoria’s (TZV) chief operations officer Paul Santamaria said Optus had provided details of around 40 calls that had experienced difficulty connecting to Telstra’s national Triple Zero (000) emergency call operator.
“Victoria Police Communications Liaison Officers located in TZV communications centres conducted welfare checks with the affected calls,” Mr Santamaria said.
An Optus spokesperson said it had resolved the issue that affected some customers’ voice calling services for about one hour and 15 minutes yesterday afternoon.
Some customers in Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory experienced intermittent call dropouts with Optus becoming aware of the issue at 1:30pm, the spokesperson said.
“Optus identified the issue within minutes through its network monitoring systems and immediately mobilised technical teams to restore services while activating established escalation processes and engaging relevant stakeholders,” a statement from Optus said.
The spokesperson said 41 calls had been referred to Victoria Police for welfare checks, with the issue resolved about 3pm yesterday.
Victoria Police said it had completed about 40 checks on impacted callers following the telecommunications outage.
“There were no adverse outcomes or issues of note,” it said.