Optus hit with another Triple Zero outage

Telecommunications giant Optus has been hit by another Triple Zero outage, leaving thousands of customers in the Illawarra region of NSW unable to reach emergency services for more than nine hours — less than two weeks after a similar failure was linked to multiple deaths.

Northern Lights alert: Why aurora could now suddenly spike

Forecasts of Northern Lights displays have been standard in the past few weeks, and the reason for that is last weekend’s fall equinox. In its wake, there could be a brief and spectacular aurora season, with geomagnetic storms generally becoming more intense than usual in the weeks surrounding the equinox. Around the fall equinox, the magnetic field of Earth and the solar wind align, a phenomenon known as the “Russell-McPherron Effect.”