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Optus pledges cooperation after deadly emergency call outage sparks outrage

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Australia’s Optus, the country’s second-largest telecom carrier, vowed Saturday to cooperate fully with government and police investigations after a 13-hour outage of emergency call services coincided with the deaths of three people, including an eight-week-old infant.

The outage, caused by a firewall upgrade gone wrong, disrupted emergency access from 12:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Thursday across parts of South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory, potentially affecting around 600 customers. Optus CEO Stephen Rue, in his second press conference since the incident, apologized again and said the company had completed welfare checks, handing unresolved cases to police.

Authorities confirmed the deaths of a baby boy and a 68-year-old woman in South Australia; a 74-year-old man in Western Australia also reportedly died during the outage. While the direct link between the failures and the fatalities is under investigation, the tragedy has fueled public anger and political scrutiny.

The Australian government labeled the failure “completely unacceptable” and pledged a full review. Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel), is already under pressure after a series of crises: a 2022 cyberattack that compromised data of 9.5 million Australians, and a 2023 nationwide outage that led to a A$12 million fine and the resignation of former CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin. Rue, who took over in November 2024, faces mounting pressure to restore trust.

Optus said it has fixed the fault and will make the results of its internal investigation public. But with public outrage building, regulators are expected to push for stricter safeguards on telecom providers’ responsibility to guarantee emergency call access.

Bell Canada Restores Internet Service After Two-Hour Outage in Quebec and Ontario

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Bell Canada announced on Wednesday that it has fully restored internet services after a technical update issue caused a significant two-hour outage affecting tens of thousands of users in Quebec and Ontario.

The disruption, which began around 9:00 a.m. ET, peaked with more than 130,000 disruption reports, according to real-time outage tracker Downdetector.com. Bell confirmed that service had been completely restored by 11:00 a.m. ET.

“We want to assure our customers and partners that this was a technical issue and we have ruled out a cybersecurity incident as the root cause,” Bell said in an emailed statement.

Cause and Response

The outage stemmed from a software update that affected some of Bell’s router infrastructure. The company responded by rolling back the update, which resolved the issue.

Bell, a unit of BCE Inc., said its network teams are conducting a full review to prevent future disruptions.

Customer Impact and Instructions

Bell serves approximately 4.4 million high-speed internet subscribers, as noted in its latest quarterly report. The full scale of the outage remains unclear, but many users in eastern Canada reported service disruptions throughout the morning.

For customers still experiencing issues, Bell advised a modem reboot via a notice on its Facebook page.

Flights Grounded and Police Forced to Communicate by Text Amid IT Outage in Netherlands

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A widespread IT outage in the Netherlands, traced back to a network issue at the Dutch Ministry of Defence, has caused significant disruptions across the country. The network failure led to grounded flights, communication breakdowns, and major IT failures.

At Eindhoven Airport, the Netherlands’ second-largest airport, flights were grounded from early morning, with at least 14 cancellations reported. Passengers faced severe delays as flights from budget airlines Ryanair and Transavia were cancelled. Some flights were redirected to Germany’s Weeze Airport, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, and Brussels Airport in Belgium. Eindhoven Airport also functions as a military airport, which may have exacerbated the issue. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has not reported any similar problems.

The IT outage has also impacted emergency services. The coastguard reported being unreachable by phone or radio, and police officers were forced to rely on mobile phones and text messaging for communication, as their usual systems were down.

Telecom company KPN experienced a major outage affecting its mobile services, though it is unclear if this issue is related to the problems at the defence ministry. The Dutch National Cybersecurity Centre has not yet determined if the outage was caused by a cyber attack.

The Dutch Ministry of Defence confirmed the network outage and is currently investigating the cause and extent of the problems. It is unclear how long the disruption will last, and no additional details have been provided.