Australia’s second-largest telco, Optus, has admitted today that almost 2700 calls to triple zero simply didn’t work during their national service outage on November 8 last year.
Until today, that number was 228, a number given by Optus executives to a Senate hearing late last year, and while over 200 people being unable to call emergency services is a troubling statistic, it gets worse today as that number increases more than ten-fold.
The telco now says that an “additional 2468 customers that made triple zero calls from our network did not reach the emergency service centre and for which a welfare check was not undertaken”, putting the total figure at 2697.
Michael Venter is the interim CEO of Optus following the departure of Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who oversaw the company during the 2022 data breach and the 2023 national outage.
He said of today’s news that “There is nothing more important to us than the safety and security of our customers, but regrettably on 8 November we did not meet the standards our customers and the community expects from us”.
“I offer my deepest apologies to all those customers who were unable to access triple zero services during the outage and did not receive a follow-up check from us,” he continued.
“We are writing to each customer individually to apologise for this and provide the opportunity to discuss their specific circumstances and whether there is anything we can do to assist them further.
“We know we let our customers down and our entire team is committed to addressing all learnings from the outage.”
Optus says it will update the Senate record on this data, and will provide all this information to the ACMA, the government body which is investigating Optus’ compliance with the emergency service call determination.