Optus boss Stephen Rue admits procedures weren’t followed before 000 outage
Five people complained to Optus about not being able to connect to triple-0 during the 13-hour outage but no alarm was raised, the telco’s boss has revealed, as he again apologised to the families of the four people who died.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue also said that “established processes were not followed” after the telco updated its systems on Thursday, leading to a 13-hour period during which its customers couldn’t contact emergency services.
The company is talking to the people involved to establish the full technical detail of the network failure and to work out why those processes weren’t followed at the time to establish what had happened.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.It has also changed its rules about customer complaints after it found that the five people who called to say they couldn’t contact triple-0 were met with “troubleshooting” rather than having the issue escalated.
“As we had not detected the triple-0 failures in our network at the time of these calls, there were no red flags for the contact centre to alert them to any live issues,” Mr Rue said on Sunday.
“This is not clearly good enough, and we are implementing a new compulsory escalation process following any customer reports of triple-0 failure to our customer call centre.”
Three people died as a result of the outage, which disrupted more than 600 emergency calls in WA, South Australia and the Northern Territory, including two Perth men, aged 74 and 49, and a 68-year-old woman from Adelaide.
The death of an eight-week-old baby was initially also thought to be linked to the outage, but SA Police have since said it was unlikely to have contributed to the child’s death.
Optus’ reviews of what happened have uncovered another two people in NSW, close to the South Australian border, who were also not able to contact triple-0.
Mr Rue reiterated how sorry he was that four people had died when they weren’t able to contact emergency services.
He also apologised on Sunday to all customers affected, saying he acknowledged that the connection failures had created immense distress.
“The news has understandably created concern for the wider community, who rightly want to know that when they need this service, it will be available to them,” he said.
Optus is now monitoring triple-0 call volumes constantly, to ensure any unusual drop-off is picked up quickly.
Mr Rue said the outage on Thursday wasn’t discovered in part because the volume of non-emergency calls was normal.
He pledged to publish the findings of an independent review the Optus board will commission, and to implement everything it recommended.
