Ms Rowland said her department was developing the terms of reference for a post-incident review, which she said would be designed to help support major telecommunications providers to improve post-outage processes.
ACMA’s review is focused on Optus’ failure to keep providing access to 000, which is probably a breach of its obligations, and focus will also fall on whether it has fallen foul of executives’ and board responsibilities under new critical infrastructure rules.
“While we welcome that Optus services were restored over the course of the day, it is critical the government conducts a process to identify lessons to be learned from yesterday’s outage,” Ms Rowland said. “Connectivity is absolutely essential for Australian consumers and businesses, and the
impacts of this outage were particularly concerning.”
Communications ‘sub par’
The government’s reviews will be significant in the light of Optus’ decision to keep the findings of the independent review into last year’s data breach debacle secret. It is unlikely to escape public scrutiny if the latest reviews find its outage was caused by incompetence or under-investment.
Mr Jones hit out at the company’s communications with customers on Wednesday, echoing concerns customers had after the data breach, saying it took too long for Optus executives to explain what was happening.
“From a customer point of view and the communications that were made by the company to the country and the customers of Optus, they were absolutely sub par,” Mr Jones said.
“Coming off the back of the previous data breach where they were facing similar calls from customers to explain exactly what was going on, this simply wasn’t good enough.”
He said Ms Rowland had gone on live TV on Wednesday morning to try to explain to Australians what was happening, trying to “fill the gaps” left by Optus’ silence.
“It’s not her job as the minister to explain what’s gone on inside a company, it’s the company’s job to do that,” Mr Jones said.
“Bizarre would be the kindest thing you could say about it. Just not good enough, frankly.”
Optus, meanwhile, issued another apology for the chaos its outage caused. Its vice president of regulatory and public affairs, Andrew Sheridan, welcomed the government review and suggested it was evaluating potential compensation offers.
“Optus looks forward to fully co-operating with the proposed reviews by both the Department of Communications and the ACMA into yesterday’s network outage,” he said.
“As a critical infrastructure provider, we understand how important it is to ensure continuity of service and any lessons learnt are likely to be helpful for both Optus and others in our industry.
“We value our customers’ loyalty, and are looking at ways to say ‘thank you’. Optus once again apologises to our customers and others that were impacted by the outage.”