ACMA takes Optus to court over September 2025 Triple Zero outage

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has today commenced proceedings in the Federal Court against Optus Mobile Pty Limited (Optus Mobile) in relation to the 18 September 2025 outage, which affected some people’s ability to connect to the emergency call service.

The ACMA alleges that during the outage, Optus Mobile breached two separate legal obligations on 1,005 occasions in that it failed to:

1. Give end-users who made emergency calls using an emergency telephone service supplied by Optus Mobile access to the emergency call service, and 

2. Ensure that those emergency calls were carried to the relevant termination point.
 

ACMA takes Optus Mobile to court over outage

The ACMA Chair Nerida O’Loughlin said in a statement that the provision of access to the emergency call service is essential to protecting the Australian public.

“Australians rightly expect that when they call Triple Zero, their call will connect. The circumstances of this outage meant that did not reliably occur, leaving people unable to connect to potentially life-saving services.

“Giving access to the emergency call service is not optional, it is a fundamental legal obligation and the most important public safety responsibility telecommunications providers have,” Ms O’Loughlin said.

The proceedings follow earlier enforcement action taken by the ACMA arising from the Optus November 2023 outage. Singtel Optus subsidiaries, including Optus Mobile, paid more than $12 million in infringement notice penalties imposed by the ACMA for breaches relating to emergency calls. These included failures to give access to the emergency call service during that outage.

“The recurrence of a major network outage affecting emergency calls so soon after the November 2023 outage is a significant concern and one of the reasons the ACMA has decided to take this matter to court.

“The ACMA will not hesitate to take strong enforcement action where alleged telco failures have jeopardised public access to the critical emergency call service,” Ms O’Loughlin said.

The ACMA is seeking commitments from Optus 

The ACMA is seeking the following from the court:

1. Declarations that Optus Mobile contravened the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Service Standards) Act 1999 on 1,005 occasions by failing to comply with obligations under sections 15 and 19 of the Telecommunications (Emergency Call Service) Determination 2019, and 

2. An order that Optus Mobile pay pecuniary penalties to the Commonwealth for these contraventions.

The maximum penalty available to the court is $250,000 per contravention.

The ACMA said: “As this matter is now before the court, the ACMA will not be making any further comments at this time.”

Optus warned to “expect significant consequences” over Triple Zero outage

Speaking at an event in Brisbane at the time, Communications Minister Anika Wells said that "Optus has failed the Australian people in what has happened here. They can expect to suffer significant consequences as a result." 

She told media that Optus had “perpetuated an enormous failure on the Australian people”.

The outage of the Triple Zero service primarily impacted residents in South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory with a failure of over 600 emergency calls across a 13-hour period.

There were four deaths across Australia that have been connected to the failure. South Australian police reported of a newborn's death with his grandmother unable to call for help on her mobile phone, only connecting to Triple Zero after using another mobile phone in the house.

Optus Chief Stephen Rue told the media that “As we had not detected the Triple Zero failures in our network at the time of these calls, there were no red flags for the contact centre to alert them to any issue. This is clearly not good enough.”

Rue said that a planned technical upgrade started at 12.30am on Thursday, ending at about 1.50pm when South Australia Police notified Optus of the problem. It took over 40 hours for Optus to inform the public over the Triple Zero failure. An investigation of call logs has found that Optus received multiple calls from customers warning it of the outage.

“This is not clearly good enough, and we are implementing a new compulsory escalation process following any customer reports or triple-0 failures, through our customer call centre,” Rue said.