Optus updates: Dapto goes down, independent review coming

A little over a week after Optus admitted to a 13-hour Triple Zero outage impacting its customers in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, the telco has announced yet another outage — this time affecting a mobile phone tower site in the Dapto area of the NSW South Coast.

In a statement issued late on Sunday, 28 September, Optus revealed that it was investigating an issue with the mobile phone tower that impacted calls made between 3 am and 12.20 pm that day, including calls made to the Triple Zero network. The population impacted was 4500 people; Optus is yet to identify the cause of the outage.

Optus said it had worked with police as part of the Triple Zero welfare check process and confirmed that all callers who attempted to contact emergency services are okay. The company has so far identified 12 Triple Zero call failures, including:

• one caller who required an ambulance and used another phone to contact emergency services;
• one caller who was trying to call emergency services but could not get through;
• four calls who were referred to NSW Police for welfare checks, including two from the same address;
• one caller who did not need emergency services assistance, according to NSW Police;
• two callers who said they had accidentally called Triple Zero; and
• three callers who said they were making test calls to Triple Zero.
   

Meanwhile, Optus Chief Executive Stephen Rue has provided further information into the mass Triple Zero outage on 18 September, revealing that the first of three steps in the firewall upgrade program that caused the outage was apparently not followed. In previous successful upgrades, calls were diverted away from the relevant part of the core network to a separate part of the core network, then re-diverted back once the upgrade was complete. This time, there was a deviation from established processes.

Rue went on to state that about 25% of the 631 affected Triple Zero customers did manage to get through to emergency services — with approximately 86 eventually succeeding through the Optus network and 65 by transferring to another carrier such as Telstra or TPG. This means there were approximately 480 customers who did not reach Triple Zero.

Optus continues to investigate why the Triple Zero calls failed to ‘camp on’ other available networks during the outage and whether there are any patterns in the call failures. The company has also announced an independent review into the outage, to be headed by Dr Kerry Schott AO — an experienced executive and board director with a deep understanding of public and private sector organisations across the infrastructure, energy and telecommunications sectors.

The independent review seeks to identify the causes and canvass the applicable processes, protocols and operations of the incident. It will examine the management of Triple Zero calls in the Optus network, including the monitoring and operational effectiveness in relation to the technical failure. Actions taken by Optus in response to the incident, including adherence to policies, procedures and legislative requirements, will also be considered.

“The Optus board is working with Chief Executive Stephen Rue and his team to ensure we develop a full understanding of what went wrong and why, and what we need to do to prevent any repetition,” said Optus Chairman John Arthur. “In the interests of transparency — and to promote greater community understanding of what went wrong and why — we are committed to sharing the facts of the incident. The appointment of Kerry Schott to conduct an independent review will support these objectives.”

The review is expected to be completed before the end of the year.

Image credit: iStock.com/tadamichi