Communications minister Anika Wells has warned that telcos could face tougher regulations after an Optus outage resulted in more than 600 failed Triple Zero calls and left three people dead.
As the communications regulator launched its inquiry into the fatal outage, Ms Wells also slammed Optus for the “egregious failure”, vowing the company would be “held accountable” and “suffer significant consequences”.
“Optus has failed the Australian people in what has happened here. They have perpetuated a failure upon the Australian people with what has happened here,” she said on Monday.
Last week’s outage — reports of which were ignored by Optus call centres — impacted South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory for 13 hours on Thursday.
Optus has blamed a technical failure during a network upgrade for the incident, which chief executive Stephen Rue on Friday said was “completely unacceptable” and would also be investigated internally.
It is the company’s second major outage affecting Triple Zero calls in less than two years, with more than 2,000 people prevented from accessing the service in November 2023.
Despite an independent review that was designed to help reduce the impact of future outages and a $12 million fine for breaching emergency call rules, Ms Wells said Optus appeared to have repeated its past mistakes.
“It appears here that, on the face of it, there has been ineffective implementation of those recommendations by Optus, and that is what now needs to be addressed by the ACMA investigation,” she said.
ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said that both the regulator and the Communications department were not made aware of the outage until after it had been resolved more than 10 hours later.
Initial emails notifying the regulator on Thursday were also “perfunctory” and, in some cases, “inaccurate”, she added, saying that it was not until Friday afternoon that information on the full extent of the outage was provided.
Ms O’Loughlin said the ACMA investigation would consider whether Optus met its obligations under the Telecommunications (Emergency Call Services) determination, notified carriage service providers and conducted welfare checks.
Another areas for investigation will be whether “there’s been significant investment, enough investment in the network to make sure it’s reliable and accessible for emergency call services”.
Ms Wells said Optus would now be expected to work with the Australian Communications and Media Authority on making their systems better, in order to prevent outages for which there are “no excuses”.
Any potential regulatory or legislative response that stems from the ACMA investigation could also have “consequences for Telstra”, Ms Wells said, which has also experienced Triple Zero outages in the past.
“This isn’t entirely a matter for Optus, so we are now considering what needs to be done holistically or as part of legislative relief for [the] Australian people, given their confidence has no doubt been shaken by what has happened here,” she said.
Telstra CEO Vicki Brady earlier this month used a Press Club address to call for regulatory reform, arguing that current regulations are “incredibly inefficient and costly” to navigate, particularly in relation to digital infrastructure.
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