Optus and Telstra Services Fully Restored After Vandalism-Induced Outage in Hexham

Optus has announced the full restoration of its services in the NSW Hunter region after a major mobile and data disruption caused by vandalism at a key mobile phone tower in Hexham, Newcastle. The outage, which began yesterday morning, impacted approximately 70,000 customers.

The company issued a statement apologising for the outage and confirming that customers were alerted about the issue, which had impacted calls to emergency services.

Widespread Network Vulnerability
The damage at the mobile tower was not limited to Optus customers. Telstra confirmed the vandalism knocked out five of its mobile sites and some landline services in the region, adding to the total mobile service disruption.

Telstra spokespeople spoke out about the broader challenge of maintaining infrastructure security:

\”Vandalism and copper theft is a significant international issue that affects all service companies… It also requires us to divert work crews to restore services, delaying us from resolving other customer issues.\”

Police have since established a crime scene at the Maitland Road location and are seeking public assistance, including dashcam footage, to identify the vandals.

Ongoing Public Safety Scrutiny
While the service restoration is complete, the incident triggers further scrutiny on network stability and public safety protocols. The failure to connect with triple zero calls due to the outage is under investigation, with welfare checks underway in the affected communities.

The timing of this infrastructure failure is critical, following closely on the heels of a Senate inquiry where Optus executives were grilled over a prior major triple zero outage in September.