Communications Minister Anika Wells has today blasted Optus following reports that the telco had an outage on its emergency call system, leading to multiple deaths.
Speaking at an event in Brisbane this morning, Wells said that “Optus has failed the Australian people in what has happened here. They can expect to suffer significant consequences as a result.” She told media that Optus had “perpetuated an enormous failure on the Australian people”.
The outage of the Triple Zero service primarily impacted residents in South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory with a failure of over 600 emergency calls across a 13-hour period.
There were four deaths across Australia that have been connected to the failure. South Australian police reported of a newborn’s death with his grandmother unable to call for help on her mobile phone, only connecting to Triple Zero after using another mobile phone in the house.
Optus Chief Stephen Rue told the media on Sunday that “As we had not detected the Triple Zero failures in our network at the time of these calls, there were no red flags for the contact centre to alert them to any issue. This is clearly not good enough.”
Rue said that a planned technical upgrade started at 12.30am on Thursday, ending at about 1.50pm when South Australia Police notified Optus of the problem. It took over 40 hours for Optus to inform the public over the Triple Zero failure. An investigation of call logs has found that Optus received multiple calls from customers warning it of the outage.
“This is not clearly good enough, and we are implementing a new compulsory escalation process following any customer reports or triple-0 failures, through our customer call centre,” Rue said.
In a comment given to the media, the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA) chair Nerida O’Loughlin said that ACMA had not been notified of the outage until after it was resolved, which is not the normal procedure. Usually, ACMA would receive multiple updates a day”as soon as the telco is aware that something has gone wrong”.
“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.”
While criminal convictions are not an option, O’Loughlin has vowed that Optus will be held accountable: “We will, as the regulator, be holding Optus to account for this second outage over the last couple of years.”
“I won’t speculate on the size of penalties because they are complicated, in terms of the number of contraventions, but there are $19,000 per infringement notice, and the court can impose up to $250,000 per contravention,” she said.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, speaking to reporters in New York, has said that he would be “surprised” if Optus chief executive Stephen Rue hadn’t considered resigning.
“Optus has obligations … and clearly they haven’t fulfilled the obligations that they have.
“There’ll be a proper investigation by the authorities and the government has action at its disposal, but the immediate concern will be that investigation,” Albanese said.