Hanson-Young will chair the Senate hearing, to be heard under the auspices of the Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications. It’s the first of a number of probes into the outage including post-incident reviews by both the Communications Department and communications watchdog, the Australian Communications Media Authority.
Last week’s outage left some 10 million Australians without phone service or access to the internet, and crippled access to vital triple-zero emergency services for some customers.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
As first reported by this masthead, the unnamed “international peering network” that Optus said had contributed to its 16-hour-long network meltdown was later revealed to be run by its Singaporean parent company Singtel.
“The Optus CEO has questions to answer tomorrow and the Senate will demand honest answers,” Hanson-Young told this masthead.
“How many people were unable to dial 000 during the 14-hour outage? “Why did Optus fail so dismally to communicate to the public and their customers?
“How can the tokenistic offer of 200GB of data possibly constitute fair compensation for those who were unable to work, contact loved ones or go about their daily lives? Did Optus put its profits ahead of the public interest?”
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“I will be asking what happened and what Optus is doing to ensure this kind of catastrophic failure does not happen again,” senator Hanson-Young said.
The terms of reference for Friday’s hearing include the steps that Optus is taking to ensure that a similar national outage doesn’t happen again; the 200 gigabytes of compensation offered to affected customers; and the role of government in ensuring Australians have reliable access to telecommunications technology.
Other committee members include Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes, and Labor senators Karen Grogan and Catryna Bilyk.
“The Optus outage last week that impacted millions of Australian consumers and small businesses was incredibly concerning,” Grogan said in a statement.
“The Senate has an important role to play in understanding what happened, and where to from here”.
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