A post-incident review into the November 8, 2023, Optus outage in Australia has also resulted in the Albanese government committing to reform the Emergency Call Service – Triple Zero – which was severely hit at the time.
Estimates vary, but the outage is believed to have directly affected more than 10 million people and 400,000 businesses across the country. Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer-Rosmarin stepped down from her role a few weeks after the incident.
The Singtel-owned company, and the second largest telco in Australia, was pulled up for its handling of the incident in a review commissioned by the government and undertaken by Richard Bean, who was the Deputy Chair of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for more than seven years.
In his report, he noted, “Australia’s telecommunications networks underpin essential government, public health, and safety infrastructure. They support critical services for consumers and businesses and facilitate almost every aspect of our everyday home and work lives. What we have come to expect from our telecommunications services has been shaped by this reliance. On 8 November 2023, this system received a shock, when the Optus network suffered a national outage. Emergency services were compromised. Hospitals were hampered in their critical work. Businesses lost the ability to trade. Transport networks were disrupted. These breakdowns posed real risks to personal health and safety, resulted in the loss of income and productivity and caused widespread distress in many parts of our community.”
He went on to add that this is not the first outage of this kind, and while “no network will ever be fully immune from technical faults or outages”, it has “become apparent that what has been learned from previous outages has not always been universally understood.”
Michelle Rowland, Minister for Communications, said this week that the principal cause of Triple Zero issues during the outage was a lack of wilting on the Optus 3G network, whereby signals are powered down in order to enable calls to be carried by another network.
She added that while Optus advised this issue was now addressed, “the outage identified a broader need to improve information flows, governance, and technical assurance frameworks in the emergency calling context.”
Bean’s recommendation to the government has resulted in the establishment of a Triple Zero Custodian framework, initially led by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO), that will ensure accountability and end-to-end oversight of Triple Zero.
The government said that it will also now require the industry to provide work plans to the regulator following a major outage, explaining how an impacted telco will mitigate the risk of a similar outage in the future.
Separately, the independent regulator – Australian Communications and Media Authority – is investigating Optus’ compliance with the Emergency Call Determination 2019.
“Australians need to have confidence in our telecommunications services, particularly when it comes to Triple Zero. Last year’s Optus outage and the Telstra Triple Zero fault earlier this year highlight vulnerabilities in the system. This Review is the most comprehensive examination of the Triple Zero ecosystem in over a decade. It means we have a workable blueprint to implement changes that will help improve the resilience of telecommunications in this country,” said Rowland.
Optus is not the only carrier to have had an issue with its Triple Zero calling system. In March this year, Telstra too faced an issue with its Triple Zero system. On March 1, Telstra said that the combination of a technical fault, an issue in its backup process and a communication error resulted in its Triple Zero team identifying an issue with Calling Line Identification (CLI) not appearing for calls coming into the service. CLI provides the telco with the location and phone number of the person calling and is needed to transfer that call to the relevant emergency services operators. Telstra noted that within 90 minutes of the incident beginning, the team had restarted the impacted server and the service returned to normal.
