Power outage takes out Victoria's Triple Zero dispatch software

Victorian emergency call operators were left taking notes with pen and paper for several hours early on Wednesday morning, after a power outage knocked out Triple Zero Victoria’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system.

It is understood the power outage affected the Triple Zero call centre at Burwood at around 12.30 am on 15 October. While the power outage itself lasted only 90 minutes, Minister for Emergency Services Vicki Ward has advised that the CAD system was not fully back online until 4 am, as it had to be put back in a way that ensured it would continue to work.

During this time, calls continued to connect but call-takers had to use pen and paper to track incidents and to dispatch ambulance, police and fire services. Victorian Ambulance Union Secretary Danny Hill explained that CAD is what dispatchers use to identify where all the ambulance resources are across the state — so when it’s not working, the dispatchers are effectively blind to where the nearest ambulance is.

According to Ward, an online backup system should have activated but failed to do so, for reasons that are currently unknown. Incidentally, the CAD software also failed at Triple Zero call centres at Williams Landing and Ballarat, but those centres did not lose power.

The news comes almost one year after then Emergency Services Minister Jaclyn Symes revealed that Hexagon and Fujitsu had been handed a $253 million contract to deliver a next-gen CAD system that would support decision-making and productivity for Triple Zero call-takers. Funding for that system was originally flagged in the 2023–24 Victorian Budget, but the contract was not finalised until 28 November 2024 — eight days after an unplanned outage took the current CAD system offline for two hours, in a similar scenario to that which occurred on Wednesday.

Victorian authorities are currently investigating the cause of the power outage that caused the latest CAD shutdown and why the backup power supply did not work. In the meantime, Victorian Nationals Leader and Shadow Emergency Services Minister Danny O’Brien has said the government needs to explain why this has happened, what it’s doing to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, and when the new system is going to be in place.

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