A fault in Australian telecom company Optus's land and mobile networks has engineers baffled.
The glitch allows customers to eavesdrop on others' phone calls.
It was originally thought to be limited to the Optus pre-paid mobile service, but smh.com.au readers have subsequently described the issue occurring in Optus' landline network as well.
According
to the online broadband community, Whirlpool the glitch works like
this. If a customer is out of credit they can ring customer care. A
recorded message tells me that I have insufficient credit left to make
the phone call, but instead of hanging up it begins to ring and it is
possible to hear conversations of other mobile phone users.
It seems that the call logs into the next phone call going through the tower or exchange."
The
Optus landline service has a similar problem. If a customer responds
to the tone on the handset notifying that they have voicemessages
stored, by pushing the voicemail button on my landline handset they
will connect to other customers trying to get their voicemail.
More here