Optus under fire: Regulator probes telco after triple-0 outage linked to three deaths

Anthony Albanese says he believes Optus chief executive Stephen Rue would be considering whether to continue leading the telephone company after it failed to notify the Government or customers that its triple-0 emergency service was offline.

“I’d be surprised if that wasn’t occurring,” the Prime Minister told ABC News Breakfast when asked if he thought the company’s chief executive should consider his position.

“We want to see a proper investigation. When we know the facts, we’ll respond to the facts when they are all made clear.”

Three people died when callers were unable to reach help through the Optus network on Thursday after a routine upgrade knocked out the triple-0 system.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is leading the investigation, which will examine whether owner Singtel underinvested in the network.

Chair Nerida O’Loughlin expressed disappointment Optus did not inform the authority and other regulators about the problem until it was fixed.

Speaking at a press conference with Communications Minister Anika Wells, Ms O’Loughlin said the investigation would also consider how Optus operates in emergencies and “whether there are systems and processes in place to alert Optus to when things are going wrong, because we’re seeing this big gap between when the outage actually occurred and when people were notified.”

Ms Wells expressed her “disappointment over the Optus outage and said “there will be consequences”.

“Optus will be held accountable for this failure. They and all providers have no excuses here,” she said.

“We will be considered about our response but there will be consequences . . . for the broader telecommunications sector.”

Ms Wells slammed the handling of the outage saying her department was first notified by Optus on Thursday afternoon at about 3pm.

“We didn’t hear anything further until 3.40pm Friday afternoon where we were told the outage affected 100 calls,” she said.

“Then shortly after, at 4pm, we were told the outage had affected 600 calls and then we found out from our department that there had been three deaths and we were told there would be a press conference from the CEO of Optus shortly.”

The 13-hour outage left more than 600 people in WA, South Australia, New South Wales and the Northern Territory unable to contact emergency services.

Three people died as a result of the outage, 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.

In a statement on Monday, ACMA said it was “deeply concerned that there had been another Optus outage affecting emergency call services”.

“Australians must be able to contact emergency services whenever they need help. This is the most fundamental responsibility every telco provider has to the public,” the statement said.

“When an emergency call fails to connect, the consequences for public health and safety can be devastating.”

ACMA will investigate Optus’ compliance with emergency call service regulations and other related rules.

“Under these regulations, telecommunications carriers and carriage service providers (CSPs) must ensure that emergency calls are successfully carried to the emergency call service at all times,” ACMA said.

“They must also undertake welfare checks on callers who made unsuccessful emergency calls during a significant network outage.

“These are the same rules that the ACMA found Optus breached in 2023 during a nationwide outage. Optus was penalised $12 million by the ACMA for these breaches.”

In its new investigation, ACMA said it would investigate Optus’ obligation to communicate the outage to customers and the public, including putting relevant, up-to-date information on its website, apps, email, SMS or other media.

It will also look into the telco’s obligation to “notify the emergency call person (Telstra) as soon as possible about a significant network outage”.

And the regulator will also probe Optus’ obligation to communicate information about the outage to “other stakeholders, including the relevant ministerial portfolio department, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, the National Emergency Management Agency and the ACMA”.

Both the WA and SA governments have expressed concern they were not told of the full extent — and consequences — of the outage until about the same time as a public media statement on Friday night.

South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas said it was a “pretty astonishing failure of appropriate disclosure from a company of this size and strength”.

“No one in our emergency services were told that the deaths occurred. No one knew anything about it. Not in the South Australian ambulance. Not in the South Australian police,” he told Sky News on Monday.

“And what makes that worse . . . is that, to the best of our knowledge, it was a South Australian Ambulance Service that first alerted us to the Optus failure.”

WA Police Commander Jodie Pearson said when Optus contacted the force at 9.04pm Thursday evening — almost 22 hours after the disruption began at 10.40pm on Wednesday — the telco described it as a “minor outage” and only asked for police to check on 26 people.

It wasn’t until late on Friday afternoon, about the same time that Optus boss Stephen Rue fronted media, that Optus told police about the full extent of the calls blocked in WA and that at least one person had died.

WA Police confirmed they had found a second person had died on Saturday.

Mr Rue on Sunday confirmed five people complained to the telco about not being able to connect to triple-0 during the outage — three more than previously thought — but no alarm was raised.

The chief executive added “established processes were not followed” during the outage, which was caused when the telco updated its systems on Thursday.

The telco late last year was was fined $12 million over its mobile network outage in November 2023 that left more than 10 million Australians without mobile or internet access, and leaving more than 2000 people being unable to make triple-0 calls.

Just weeks after the outage, then chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned after overseeing a tumultuous period for the company that also included a major cyber attack.

In September 2022, Optus suffered a massive data breach that affected millions of Australians and resulted in the driver’s licence, Medicare and passport numbers of 10,000 customers being stolen and leaked online.

The telco faced intense criticism for its slow response.