‘Mistakes, gaps’ during deadly Optus triple-zero outage
A report has revealed at least 10 mistakes were made by Optus and contractor Nokia during an outage that caused hundreds of triple zero calls to fail across four regions.
The two deaths were related to unconnected emergency calls during outages in South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of far western NSW on September 18.
Optus’ board published an independent review into the incident on Thursday; This review identified gaps in process, responsibility and escalation protocols that required urgent intervention.
It was also noted that cultural challenges at Optus affected decision-making and response times.
The report revealed at least 10 mistakes were made by Optus staff and contractor Nokia during the network upgrade.
The upgrade by Optus and Nokia was “not unusual” but the instructions given by Optus to Nokia about the required changes were incorrect.
The failure lasted almost 14 hours, during which time 455 of 605 triple zero calls from the affected areas could not be connected.
It took Optus and Nokia about 13 hours to learn of the problem, the report said; The operations center was provided with early warnings but received only cursory attention.
Optus has pledged to quickly implement all 21 recommendations in the report, completed by experienced executive Kerry Schott.
Recommendations include better processes for making routine network changes and addressing the siled nature of work at the company.
Optus chairman John Arthur said the failures were unacceptable and the board would take further action against individuals, including financial penalties and potentially redundancies.
“We deeply regret the 18 September outage that affected triple zero services and the consequences for Australians trying to reach emergency services,” he said.
“We understand that it is very important that the community has access to triple zero services at all times.”
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