Australia’s communications regulator has begun its investigation into an Optus triple-0 outage linked to multiple deaths, with Communications Minister Anika Wells warning there will be consequences for the telco.
Last week’s outage primarily impacted South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory and resulted in the failure of more than 600 emergency calls over 13 hours.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue revealed on Friday that three people had died during the outage, which he said was “completely unacceptable”.
Ms Wells told journalists in Brisbane on Monday that the company would be “held accountable”.
“We will be considered about our response but there will be consequences,” Ms Wells said.
“They and all providers have no excuses here.”Regulator not notified till after the fact
Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA) chair Nerida O’Loughlin said her agency was not notified of the outage until after it was resolved, which is counter to the usual processes.
For significant outages, she said, the regulator would typically receive multiple emails a day “as soon as the telco is aware that something has gone wrong”.
What we know about the Optus outage
“In this case, we didn’t know that something had gone wrong until the matter had been resolved more than 10 hours later,” she said.
“The emails we received on Thursday were perfunctory and some were inaccurate. It wasn’t until the Friday, and very late in the day before the press conference, when we were informed by the CEO that there was 624 calls in play and of the deaths.”
Ms Wells said she was first informed that there was an outage affecting 10 calls on Thursday afternoon and then did not hear anything further until Friday, when she was notified that it had grown to 100 calls.
Twenty minutes later, she said, she was told that 600 calls had been impacted and, shortly after, her department informed her that three deaths had occurred.
“Optus has failed the Australian people in what has happened here. They can expect to suffer significant consequences as a result,” she said.
Ms Wells said she had spoken with the Optus chief executive over the weekend and expressed “my unbelievable disappointment that we were here again so quickly”.
Second Optus triple-0 outage in two years
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declined to say whether Mr Rue should step down over the incident when asked on Monday, but said he would “be surprised” if the chief executive had not thought about it.
“I’d be surprised if that wasn’t occurring, but … [what] we want to see is the investigation take place,” he said in New York, where he will soon be joined by Ms Wells to present to the United Nations on the upcoming social media ban.
“Optus has obligations, as do other communications companies, and quite clearly … they haven’t fulfilled the obligations that they have,” he said.
The prime minister added that the government had “action at its disposal” but the first concern would be undertaking a proper investigation to “find out the facts, exactly how this happened”.
Mr Rue last week blamed the outage on a technical fault identified during a network upgrade.
Over the weekend, the telco revealed that two customers contacted the company’s call centre early on Thursday to alert them to the triple-0 failure.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue said the outage was completely unacceptable. (Reuters: Hollie Adams)
One of those calls was made as early as 9am, hours before the problem was fixed, and well over a day before the company held a media conference disclosing key details.
The number of deaths potentially linked to the outage grew to four over the weekend, before South Australian police said the Optus failure was unlikely to have contributed to the death of an eight-week-old baby near Adelaide.
A 68-year-old woman in Adelaide and two men in Perth, aged 74 and 49, also died during the outage.
It is the second time in recent years that an Optus outage has impacted triple-0 calls.
ACMA found Optus failed to provide access to the emergency call service for 2,145 people during an outage in 2023.
Optus then failed to conduct 369 welfare checks on people who had tried to make an emergency call during the outage.
The telecommunications company was subsequently hit with more than $12 million in penalties.
“We didn’t expect to be here again so soon, less than two years after that breach,” Ms O’Loughlin said.
“As the minister said, we will, as the regulator, be holding Optus to account for this second outage over the last couple of years.”
Optus could face fines of more than $10 million and could be liable for other penalties over the incident.
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