Optus has been grilled mercilessly after the first week of an extensive probe. The assessment revealed significant operational failures that contributed to a 14-hour outage occurring September 18. Safe emergency call services were threatened and compromised all across South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Other areas of far-west New South Wales felt the effects as well. Consequently, 605 emergency calls were attempted, but an appalling 455 of those attempted calls did not go through.
The cause of this outage was that the system was unable to reroute voice calls. This included important emergency response calls prior to shutting down a gateway at an exchange station in South Australia. The review found that Optus had committed ten major errors in the way it conducted the network upgrade. The first mistake was in providing faulty direction to Nokia on how to perform the upgrade. This oversight inadvertently resulted in a breakdown in processing emergency calls.
Even during the outage, only 66 of those callers were able to complete the process known as “camp-on.” In addition, this process allows emergency 911 calls to be routed on a different network. This was a frustratingly 40-60 second process on some devices. These delays raised concerns over the speed at which emergency services can reach individuals in high-stakes scenarios.
Schott, who led the review, is flabbergasted by the few completed “camp-on” connections.
“The real tragedy here was the duration of the triple-zero call outage and the failure of Optus and its contractors to deal immediately with the warning signals they received,” – Schott
He pressed the urgency of the situation. In emergencies people can hardly afford to wait. Future responses are important, but immediate responses are vital.
“In an emergency, people are unlikely to hang on for this length of time, especially when the only response they are getting is silence on the line,” – Schott
The Australian Greens have responded to these findings by calling for an independent review by government of the camp-on provisions. They are calling for a full government reassessment of Optus’ license and the conditions attached to it.
Schott took care to emphasize that Optus should not blame its failures on an overzealous hacker. He specifically called them out for jumping ahead of the normal process. He voiced the need for better communication by telecoms to customers about service interruptions in advance of disasters.
“We are deeply sorry for the 18 September outage that impacted triple-zero services and the consequences for any Australians who were trying to reach emergency services,” – John Arthur
Schott emphasized that the mistakes made by Optus could only be attributed to a lack of care and adherence to established procedures. He highlighted the importance of improved communication from telecommunications companies regarding potential delays in service during emergencies.
“This delay is something that customers at all telecommunications companies should be informed about,” – Schott
