It’s been two days since three people, including an eight-week-old baby, died after a devastating Optus outage caused hundreds of emergency calls to fail, but information about the incident remains scarce.<\/p>\n
The incident was made public during a snap-media conference on Friday, with the telco blaming a technical fault identified in the process of a network upgrade.<\/p>\n
Authorities and customers have been left dumbfounded and furious, given Optus was previously reprimanded for a similar outage two years ago.<\/p>\n
So what went wrong and what does it mean for the telco going forward?<\/p>\n
What we know<\/p>\n
Optus has provided very little information about Thursday’s outage, which caused the failure of 600 triple-zero calls across South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.<\/p>\n
Two deaths in SA and one in WA were linked to the incident.<\/p>\n
SA Police said an eight-week-old boy from the town of Gawler and a 68-year-old woman from Queenstown.<\/p>\n
What’s not known is why only triple-zero calls were affected, and why emergency backups did not kick in.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Optus says it continues to investigate the cause of the incident. (ABC News: Andrew Seabourne)<\/p>\n
University of Adelaide lecturer Mark Stewart \u2014 who has previously consulted for Telstra \u2014 said there were two potential points of failure.<\/p>\n
“Its root cause was in a network upgrade, and a secondary failure in the emergency ‘camp-on’ capability that should have allowed people to use an alternative service provider,” Mr Stewart said.<\/p>\n
“There is a long standing, worldwide trend for companies to inadequately resource the testing and disaster recovery planning associated with network upgrades.”<\/p>\n
Who knew what, and when?<\/p>\n
It appears emergency services and state government were unaware of the outage \u2014 and its tragic outcomes \u2014 until yesterday evening.<\/p>\n
Western Australia’s ambulance service claimed it was left in the dark and “had no briefing from Optus about any outage issues in recent days”.<\/p>\n
WA Premier Roger on Friday afternoon said he had only been informed of the incident “a short time ago”.<\/p>\n
His South Australian counterpart, Peter Malinauskas, said Optus had not told the state government one of its own had died prior to last night’s press conference.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Peter Malinauskas is accusing Optus of unprecedented incompetence.\u00a0 (ABC News: Che Chorley)<\/p>\n
“I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation in respect to communications worse than this,” he said.<\/p>\n
SA Police said it was “not yet aware of the details of any of the deaths in SA as a result of the outage”.<\/p>\n
When pressed about the timing of the announcement and why the deaths had not been disclosed sooner, Optus head Stephen Rue could offer little clarity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Stephen Rue said he shared the community’s frustration over the incident. (ABC News: John Gunn)<\/p>\n
He said the telco had been working on “establishing the facts” and conducting welfare checks throughout the day.<\/p>\n