Around 1,400 people in the Empire Bay area remained without NBN coverage on Wednesday, September 20, after services went down at around 9am on Tuesday, September 19.
The situation was brought to public attention on local radio station CoastFM’s Wednesday morning news briefings.
Businesses were thrown into chaos and residents were left with no form of communication, with well documented poor mobile phone reception over much of the Bouddi peninsula.
Local businesswoman Lisa Sanasi was just one of those affected.
“I depend on NBN connection for any form of communication,” she said.
“The area where I live has no phone reception at all.
“Not only can I not do any business communications but I feel threatened and very vulnerable.
“If I need to call an ambulance for an emergency I can’t.
“People could potentially die because of this.
“It’s just insane.”
Some who have phone coverage and were able to call NBN were put on hold for up to 35 minutes on Tuesday, September 19, to be told services would resume by 6pm that day.
But by Wednesday morning, September 20, services remained inactive.
Killcare Surf Club and Bells at Killcare were among the many businesses that were completely offline as of mid-afternoon on Wednesday.
The area’s popular work hub Koworks at the Killcare Surf Club was understandably empty after the network went down.
An NBN spokesperson confirmed that infrastructure in the Empire Bay area had been damaged by a third party, resulting in a loss of fixed-line internet services for about 1400 customers in the surrounding suburbs.
“We have crews on site repairing the damage and restoring services as quickly as possible, however the damage is extensive,” the spokesperson said on Wednesday.
“A notification was sent to internet providers yesterday about the outage to pass onto their customers in the impacted areas.
“Customers wanting more information can check with their provider or go to NBN’s network status page at nbn.com.au/outages for updates.”
A spokesperson from the office of Member for Robertson Gordon Reid reportedly contacted NBN Co and the Telecommunications Minister to seek information about the outage.
The office received replies that a third party was responsible for the outage.
NBN internet services were reportedly progressively returning to normal as of late Wednesday afternoon.
CCN