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Government Warns Optus of ‘Significant Consequences’ After Triple Zero Failure Linked to Deaths

ACMA has launched a formal investigation into a 13-hour breakdown that blocked more than 600 emergency calls.

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FILE - A customer waits for service at a Optus store in Sydney, Australia, Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021. (AP Photo/Mark Baker, File)
FILE - A customer waits for service at a Optus store in Sydney, Australia, Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021. (AP Photo/Mark Baker,File)
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - NOVEMBER 21: Pedestrians walk past an Optus store in the CBD on November 21, 2023 in Sydney, Australia. Optus' CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin stepped down on Monday after an extended outage last week caused millions of Australians to be disconnected from the network, with no access to emergency numbers for hours. The outage followed a hack that saw millions of customers' data shared online last year. (Photo by Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

Overview

  • Communications Minister Anika Wells said Optus would be held to account, as the prime minister noted he would be surprised if CEO Stephen Rue was not considering his position.
  • Regulator Nerida O’Loughlin said her agency was not notified until after the incident was resolved and that initial emails from Optus were perfunctory and in parts inaccurate.
  • Authorities say 624 emergency calls failed across South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of New South Wales, with several deaths linked and causation still under investigation.
  • Optus attributes the failure to a routine firewall upgrade, acknowledged at least five unheeded customer warnings and a roughly 40-hour delay in public disclosure, and has ordered an independent review with a compulsory escalation process for Triple Zero reports.
  • The episode follows a 2023 breach that drew more than $12 million in penalties, prompting warnings of further financial sanctions and renewed scrutiny of industry rules and resilience standards.