Overview

• Department officials testified that Optus sent two outage emails on September 18 to a defunct, unmonitored inbox, which were only found after the regulator ACMA phoned the department on September 19.
• The September 18 failure followed a routine firewall upgrade and prevented more than 600 emergency calls from connecting across South Australia, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and parts of New South Wales in an outage linked to three deaths.
• Calls did not fall back to another carrier as required by law, and officials stressed that notification is only valid when sent to the designated mailbox.
• Officials noted Optus had used the correct address for previous incidents, underscoring that the error was the telco’s failure to follow the established channel.
• Communications Minister Anika Wells met Optus chief executive Stephen Rue and introduced legislation to establish a statutory Triple Zero watchdog, while the opposition pressed for an independent inquiry beyond ACMA’s review.