Overview
- Stephen Rue told senators the failure was caused by human error during a firewall upgrade at the Regency Park exchange, where technicians failed to divert traffic before locking a session border gateway.
- Optus disclosed Nokia contractors used an outdated procedure rated as zero risk and brought the work forward without proper authorisation, while automated alarms were dismissed and five customer reports about Triple Zero failures went un‑escalated.
- The outage left 605 customers unable to reach emergency services for more than 14 hours; Optus only identified the failure at 1:17pm after a call from South Australia’s ambulance service, with services restored by 2:34pm.
- Rue said Optus learned of a fatality at 8:43pm on 18 September, senior management were emailed after midnight, he was told around 8:15am the next day, and he did not inform ACMA until about 2:30pm or the communications minister until about 4pm.
- Optus announced about 300 new onshore call‑centre roles for Triple Zero and vulnerable customers, accelerated onshoring of network operations currently performed by Nokia, a 150‑person process improvement hub, and an independent review led by Dr Kerry Schott alongside consultancy Kearney, as senators flagged calling Singtel and regulators enforced new real‑time outage reporting rules.