Legal Action Follows September 2025 Emergency Call Failures
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has officially commenced proceedings in the Federal Court against Optus Mobile Pty Limited regarding a network outage on 18 September 2025 that disrupted access to emergency call services.
The regulator alleges that Optus Mobile breached two separate legal obligations on 1,005 occasions during the outage. Specifically, the company is accused of failing to provide end-users with access to the emergency call service and failing to ensure those emergency calls were successfully carried to the relevant termination point.
Regulatory Stance and Prior Infractions
ACMA Chair Nerida O’Loughlin emphasized the critical nature of public safety and emergency service access.
“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.”
This legal escalation follows earlier enforcement actions stemming from an Optus outage in November 2023, where subsidiaries paid over $12 million in infringement notice penalties for similar failures to connect emergency calls. Noting that the recurrence so soon after the 2023 incident is a major concern, the regulator stated it will not hesitate to pursue strong enforcement when public access to critical services is jeopardized.
The ACMA is requesting the court to issue declarations that Optus Mobile contravened the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Service Standards) Act 1999 across 1,005 instances under the Telecommunications (Emergency Call Service) Determination 2019, alongside orders for pecuniary penalties where maximum limits reach $250,000 per contravention. With the matter now before the court, no further comments will be issued a
