Optus began a change described as "a regular upgrade" to its
firewall systems at approximately 12:30am on Thursday, 18 September 2025. These changes are believed to have caused calls to Triple Zero to have intermittently failed across the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia; normal calls were unaffected. It was later revealed that two additional calls from the New South Wales town of
Broken Hill near the South Australian border were affected, as they were routed through South Australian
towers. The upgrade to the firewall resulted in the system incorrectly blocking calls to emergency services. It is believed that only Triple Zero was affected due to these calls being handled by a separate emergency calling system inside Optus' network. In a media release, Optus stated that initial testing identified that normal calls were connecting as expected and that national call volume monitoring "did not raise any red flags". The company says that "there were no alarms to alert [them] that some emergency calls were not making it through", but that their monitoring system excluded Triple Zero calls. At least two calls to the Optus contact centre around 9am notifying the company of the issue were believed to have not been properly escalated or investigated. Optus later admitted that a further review of contact centre activity found at least three additional calls were made to notify Optus of the issue, none of which were properly investigated by the company. Optus and
NSW Police have completed welfare checks of the two callers from New South Wales. SA Police have said that initial investigations suggest the death of the eight-week-old boy in
Gawler West was unlikely to have been caused by the failure, and that the delay in contacting Triple Zero would not have prevented the death. The grandmother of the child attempted to call emergency services using her mobile phone on the Optus network, but used a second device in the household when her phone did not connect the first time. Police are continuing to investigate the impact of the outage on the death of the 68-year-old woman.
Communication with emergency services The
WA Government has said that they were only notified by Optus that they had identified potentially-related death late Friday afternoon, more than 24-hours after the incident and after preparing media statements. Acting Premier
Rita Saffioti claimed that Optus failed to abide by protocols for Triple Zero outages, and it wasn't until just after 9pm that Optus notified WA Police about the outage. At the time, Optus disclosed only 26 of the total 149 failed calls in WA during the outage. Optus had already begun its own welfare checks before notifying police, and CEO Rue said that police were only notified of individual cases where Optus was unable to contact the caller. == Response after the outage ==