An Optus network outage lawsuit has been filed against the telco in the Federal Court over the September 2025 network outage during which calls failed to reach Triple Zero (000), according to ABC News. The Australian Communications and Media Authority alleges that Optus, the nation’s second-largest telco, breached two legal obligations more than 1,000 times.
According to ABC News, the alleged breaches included failing to ensure customers who made emergency calls had access to the emergency call service, and failing to ensure those calls were carried appropriately. The maximum penalty available to the court is $250,000 per contravention.
The outage occurred in September 2025 and lasted almost 14 hours, and has been linked to two deaths, ABC News reported. During the outage, 75% of Triple Zero calls failed, out of a total of 605 attempts, according to a report by business and public service executive Kerry Schott.
Optus released Schott’s review in December, which found that widespread failures contributed to the outage and prevented a faster resolution. The report found that a routine network upgrade was affected by multiple failures involving Optus and its contractor, Nokia, with as many as 10 crucial mistakes identified, according to ABC News. It also found that the Optus call centre failed to escalate warnings from five callers who reported that Triple Zero calls were failing.
ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said the public must be able to access Triple Zero in an emergency. “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,” O’Loughlin said, according to ABC News. Further information on ACMA’s regulatory role is available through the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s official website.
ACMA had previously taken action against Optus following a separate outage in November 2023. That investigation found that Optus had failed in the management of its network in a number of areas and that the earlier outage should have been preventable, and that the company had failed to follow up on the safety and wellbeing of more than 360 customers after the outage was resolved, ABC News reported. The earlier enforcement action resulted in Singtel Optus subsidiaries, including Optus Mobile, paying more than $12 million in infringement notice penalties.
O’Loughlin said the recurrence of a major outage affecting emergency calls so soon after the 2023 incident was a significant concern and one of the reasons ACMA decided to pursue this legal action, according to ABC News. In a statement, an Optus spokesperson said it would not be appropriate to comment on the legal proceedings, but that the company remained focused on “building a stronger and better Optus” and continued to invest in network resilience and improve its services.
Mark Gregory, a telecommunications industry expert and associate professor at RMIT University, said the more than 1,000 alleged contraventions could result in penalties totaling as much as $250 million, calling it a signal that the telecommunications industry had been “put on notice,” according to ABC News. Following the 2023 outage, the federal government introduced new laws establishing a Triple Zero Custodian and granting ACMA greater powers to hold telcos accountable. The Optus network outage lawsuit follows a broader global trend of regulators taking stronger enforcement action against major technology and telecommunications companies, including recent cases such as Google being fined €890 million by the EU.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said she welcomed the court action against Optus, describing the alleged failures as “serious,” according to ABC News. No timeline for the Optus network outage lawsuit proceedings was included in the available reporting.
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