Optus update: Senate inquiry begins, vandals cause new outage

It’s been another bad week for Optus, with the telco facing the Senate inquiry into September’s Triple Zero outage — while also dealing with a new outage linked to the vandalism of a telecommunications tower in the Hunter region.

More than 30,000 Optus customers across 15 postcodes lost mobile phone and data services yesterday (5 November) after fibre lines were cut at a telecommunications tower in Hexham, a suburb of Newcastle. A statement from the NSW Police Force said the damage was believed to have been caused at about 9.30 am that day, with officers from Newcastle City Police District commencing an investigation at around 3.15 pm.

Optus said that services had been restored for the majority of affected customers by 5.45 pm, and for all affected customers by 9 pm. This means many customers were without service for several hours — 13 of whom attempted to call Triple Zero during the course of the outage.

Optus has since confirmed that welfare checks have been carried out on all 13 customers, with no adverse outcomes reported. Some calls were also successfully diverted to the Telstra network during the outage, the company said.

The outage occurred just two days after Optus CEO Stephen Rue addressed the Senate inquiry into Optus and the Triple Zero ecosystem following the mass outage on 18 September. Here, Rue confirmed that the catalyst of the outage was a human error, when the wrong process plan was selected for a routine firewall upgrade.

“The selected plan did not divert traffic before locking equipment inside the exchange that routes Triple Zero calls,” Rue explained. This scenario — where Triple Zero was down but other calls were continuing — had an impact on Optus’s ability to properly detect and understand the extent of the outage, Rue said.

Rue said Optus has since made changes to address the above issues, including explicit confirmation that emergency call routing is functioning both before and after network changes; 24/7 state-by-state monitoring of Triple Zero call volumes and failure rates; an overhaul of contact centre procedures, including a mandatory escalation process for any customer reports of Triple Zero issues; daily Triple Zero test calls in every state and territory; and the establishment of a dedicated Critical Services Team to ensure rapid response to incidents affecting calls to Triple Zero.

The company will also add around 300 people to its Australian call centres focused on Triple Zero and vulnerable customers, accelerating its plans to take back in-house network activities currently performed by Nokia, both onshore and offshore, by May 2027. The telco is also recruiting 150 people to be part of a new Process Centre of Excellence in Australia to accelerate the transformation and overhaul procedures across the business.

Communications consumer group ACCAN (the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network) remains unimpressed with Optus’s handling of the situation, particularly the 18-hour delay between when the company first became aware of a death linked to the outage and when it notified the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA) of this development. Minister for Communications Anika Wells was similarly kept in the dark about the extent of the outage.

Optus defended its actions by saying it wanted to have as much information as possible — which it gathered via welfare checks — before addressing the government, the regulator and the Australian public, but ACCAN CEO Carol Bennett said her organisation expects telcos to show the same speed in communicating to the regulator and emergency services as they do in briefing their company boards.

Bennett also expressed her concern about ACMA’s failure to confirm the accuracy of the information initially provided by Optus on 18 September, which claimed only 10 calls had been impacted. ACCAN is however optimistic that the inquiry will get to the bottom of any systemic failures, including ACMA’s powers as the communications regulator and its role in protecting the public interest.

Image credit: iStock.com/Jamaludin Yusup