ELIAS CLURE, REPORTER: This is Stewy and his job is to catch snakes.
STEWART GATT, SNAKE CATCHER: 24 hours, 7 days a week on call and we just go from house to house as people require us, removing venomous snakes from people’s houses backyards, businesses, vehicles. You name it, we’ve probably caught it.
ELIAS CLURE: Yesterday, Stewy’s business went from catching coils to complete calamity. An Optus customer, his business phones were all out of action.
STEWART GATT: Didn’t receive any calls, couldn’t make any outgoing calls, because I couldn’t even access my phone maps to get from one job to another for people that were actually messaging the Facebook page.
ELIAS CLURE: He believes he lost up to $2,000 in business because he couldn’t be contacted.
STEWART GATT: We might be right with this bloke because we got him and he’s still alive and he’s still alert.
ELIAS CLURE: But a bigger concern, his customers were having to contend with venomous creatures on their own.
STEWART GATT: Some people had to kill the snakes, other people left the house, and they didn’t want to go back to their house, you know, until somebody went to check to see if the snake was still there.
It is a serious snake.
If they were bitten by that snake, they’ve only got 20 minutes, half an hour max to get to a hospital before they start to deteriorate and if they couldn’t contact Triple-000, we could have had quite a few deaths on our hands.
SAMMY J: Sammy J with you. We started this morning at 5.30 to discover that all the trains were not running. It is as a result of this nationwide Optus outage …
ELIAS CLURE: Optus’ nightmare day began in the early hours of yesterday morning as 10 million customers woke to no phone or internet coverage.
MARK GREGORY, TELECOMMUNICATIONS EXPERT, RMIT: In today’s environment it’s unthinkable that an entire telco could go offline.
PAUL BUDDE, TELCO ANALYST: It’s certainly one of the biggest I’ve ever seen.
ELIAS CLURE: Optus is yet to reveal the cause of the early morning blackout, but experts believe it was a combination of human error and a precariously built system.
PAUL BUDDE: It’s on the software, the computer side of the business and these are all interconnected so if you get a fault and it’s a serious one, and it looks like this was a serious one, then it cascades through all these computer systems and one by one they’re shutting off.
ELIAS CLURE: The implications of the outage were felt across Australia. Melbourne’s train network came to halt, hospital phone systems fell quiet, Triple-000 calls from some Optus phones weren’t going through and the Australian Communications and Media Authority is now investigating.
MARK GREGORY: This is a legislated requirement that Optus has failed to achieve yesterday and it’s a critical requirement. It is a matter of life and death.
MICHELLE ROWLAND, COMMUNICATIONS MINISTER: It is concerning to see that landline calls from Optus to the Triple-000 service were not getting through.
ELIAS CLURE: The Optus outage lasted over nine hours.
KELLY BAYER ROSMARIN, OPTUS CEO (Yesterday): Unfortunately, it does happen. It happens to telcos all around the world, it happens to other telcos in Australia. We try and avoid it happening and we will make sure we learn as much as we possibly can from what occurred.
MARK GREGORY: You wouldn’t expect the large telcos in Europe or America or really in any other country to have been out for that long.
ELIAS CLURE: Today people are asking how this could have happened and will it happen again. Well, telecommunication experts have come to the sobering conclusion that it could and probably will unless both Optus and Telstra both improve their systems.
MARK GREGORY: The telcos like all technology companies want to minimise their engineering spend. They’re trying to maximise their profit and they’re trading off the possibility that there will be outages or failures in their efforts to make a larger profit.
PAUL BUDDE: We had a problem with Telstra in May this year. Of course, we had the big hack from Optus September last year and as I’ve mentioned we’ve had similar sort of, not at this scale, but similar sort of outages that lasted for half a day.
So it’s not just Optus, it’s Telstra, it’s Vodaphone.
ELIAS CLURE: Telecommunications expert Mark Gregory believes that both major telcos – which is relied upon by 400 other mobile and internet providers – have not built in proper fail safes to their systems so if one thing goes wrong, a backup system can keep things online.
MARK GREGORY: We don’t have the reliability and redundancy that many of us would expect our technology companies to have.
PAUL BUDDE: You cannot have a single point of fail.
ELIAS CLURE: And telco analyst Paul Budde believes a lack of legislation and regulation has allowed the companies to operate systems without redundancies that can prevent extended outages.
PAUL BUDDE: It all goes back to when Telstra was privatised back in the 1990’s. At that point in time people like myself and others argued that now was the time was to come up with some good regulations.
It’s not just another company like another chocolate factory, no, this is integral to our society, to our economy and that was not recognised when Telstra was privatised and that situation has continued till now.
ELIAS CLURE: Telstra told 7.30 it was committed to investing more to improve its coverage capacity and resilience.
While Optus has said it does have multiple redundancies and fall-back. Today it offered its customers 200 gigabytes of free date.
Investigations into the specific cause of the Optus outage is ongoing. The Federal Government wants answers and has announced a review into the saga.
MICHELLE ROWLAND: It’s important, I believe, to have a post-incident review that is both thorough in scope, but also is completed expeditiously.
MARK GREGORY: We need to identify what went wrong and we know that it was more than just a human error or an infrastructure error.
What we know is that it’s a decision made by the company in the way that their network is designed and built.
ELIAS CLURE: Optus has ruled out compensation for businesses affected by yesterday’s blackout, but the outage may just come back to bite them, with at least two state governments, businesses, and a snake catcher threatening to make a switch.
STEWART GATT: I’ve been with Optus since 1996 and I’m just about ready to jump ship to another provider.