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NSW Police are investigating damage to a mobile phone tower in the Hunter, believed to be the cause of Wednesday's Optus outage that potentially cut Hunter residents off from Triple-0.

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It was understood the outage was linked in a police report to suspected vandalism and copper theft as the telco's technician's worked to restore coverage to its 5G+ and 5G networks in some 15 Hunter postcodes around Port Stephens and Maitland.

In a brief statement, Optus said its customers' ability to contact Triple-0 "may be impacted", and apologised.

Welfare checks for customers whose

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