Optus has admitted that its established processes were not followed after it failed to respond to at least five customer calls reporting issues with the triple zero emergency line. The telco's chief executive, Stephen Rue, confirmed on Sunday that the calls were routed to an offshore call centre but did not trigger any escalation because the network failure had not been detected at that time.
The outage, caused by a botched firewall update at 12:30am on Thursday, blocked hundreds of calls to emergency services in South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. It has been linked to at least three deaths, including a 68-year-old woman and a 74-year-old man in Adelaide, and a 49-year-old man in Perth. An eight-week-old boy from Gawler West, north of Adelaide, also died, but police now believe the outage is unlikely to have contributed to his death.
Federal Emergency Management Minister Kristy McBain described Optus's handling of the situation as 'absolutely disgraceful', noting that this is the second major network failure in two years. The government has faced pressure to impose stiff penalties on the telco. Communications Minister Anika Wells said on Sunday that 12 of 18 recommendations from a review of the November 2023 outage have been enacted, with the remainder under way.
Rue stated that an independent investigation will be conducted, and the board is in active discussions about appointing a reviewer. In the interim, he has halted all future network changes until a broader understanding of the events is achieved. Optus has also discovered two additional cases in New South Wales, near the South Australian border, where customers were affected.
