Optus has been facing growing scrutiny after a massive 10-hour outage that stopped thousands of callers from getting through to emergency services. The telecommunications firm had already admitted that two further people in New South Wales (NSW) were unable to call for emergency assistance during the event. This shocking news led to investigations into a possible connection between the widespread outage and at least 8 preventable deaths.
The outage has drawn attention to the serious implications of such failures, particularly in light of recent fatalities linked to the fault. Authorities are investigating the deaths of two men in Perth: a 74-year-old from Willetton and a 49-year-old from Kensington. South Australia Police confirmed that an eight-week-old boy from Gawler West, north of Adelaide, was one of the victims. He was one of four people who sadly died because of the outage.
In a statement, SA Police noted that while the connection between the outage and the deaths is under investigation, it is “unlikely to have contributed to the death.” Despite all that, the obvious failure of accountability at Optus alarmed and outraged many.
Federal emergency services minister, Kristy McBain, said the outage was “absolutely disgraceful.” Her remarks at a recent Congressional hearing emphasize an important point: communication systems are frequently unreliable. This is especially worrisome during crisis events, when having reliable access to emergency services can make a difference between life and death.
Optus did understand how grave the situation, not just for them, was. They promised to adopt a standard escalation process for complaints about inability to reach emergency services. This new procedure has potential to address long-standing customer concerns over triple-zero access via Optus’ call centre. We’re going to tackle these examples with even greater urgency.
“Not good enough and we are implementing a new compulsory escalation process following any customer reports of triple zero failures through our customer call centre.” – Rue
The impact of that outage didn’t just reverberate for customers in NSW, South Australian customers, too, suffered serious consequences. Optus is now left with the difficult prospect of restoring public trust while dealing with the ramifications of its failings. The company is committing to move more quickly to address the issues that led to this outage. They’re not just interested in fixing the existing dangerous spots.
