Australian mobile carrier Optus suffered yet another network outage this week, which it has blamed on vandalism to its infrastructure.

The outage impacted around 14,000 users near Melbourne, and comes two months after Optus suffered a significant Triple Zero outage during which four people died, and more than 600 customers were impacted.

Optus said that it was not aware of any failure to connect emergency calls this time around.

The carrier has since restored services on its network, blaming the cause of the network outage on vandals who cut a fiber cable in Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne.

“Optus confirms that mobile services in the Frankston and Mornington Peninsula areas of Victoria have now been fully restored following a suspected vandalism incident earlier today,” the telco said in a statement, as reported by News.com Australia.

“The incident occurred at a Telstra pit on the Mornington Peninsula where a fiber cable was cut."

Some reports initially noted that the fiber cable was an aerial one. The police are investigating the incident, Optus stated.

Optus has already suffered several outages in the past couple of months, including another fiber cut earlier this month.

The carrier is under heavy scrutiny for the September 18 outage, where it has been accused of acting slowly to cooperate with the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) about the fatalities.

That outage was followed by another emergency network outage later in the same month.

At the time, Optus stated that the incident centered around a mobile phone tower site in the Dapto area in New South Wales. The telco subsequently blamed network vendor Ericsson for that outage.

The outages have put pressure on CEO Rue, who took over the role last November, replacing Kelly Bayer, who resigned amid the fallout from a previous outage that lasted more than 14 hours in November 2023.

As such, the carrier was slapped with an AU$12 million (US$7.93m) fine. Its head of networks, Lambo Kanagaratnam, also quit months later.