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Optus Faces ‘Significant Consequences’ as ACMA Probes 13-Hour Triple Zero Failure Tied to Deaths

Regulators say they were told only after the breakdown was fixed, escalating government threats of penalties.

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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

  • ACMA has opened a formal investigation after Optus’ emergency-call failure, with the communications minister promising the carrier will be held to account.
  • The outage blocked 624 Triple Zero calls over about 13 hours on Thursday across South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of New South Wales.
  • Authorities have linked three deaths to the failure, and police now say an initially cited case involving an infant in SA was unlikely to be caused by the outage.
  • Optus says a routine firewall update triggered the disruption, while at least five customer warnings were not escalated and initial notifications to government and ACMA were late and inaccurate.
  • Under pressure from the prime minister’s comments about his tenure, CEO Stephen Rue has ordered an independent review and introduced a compulsory escalation process for reported Triple Zero issues; ACMA notes only financial penalties are available and recalls Optus’ $12m fine in 2023.