Growing Demands for Independent Investigation into Optus Emergency Service Failures

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The latest outage was linked to a mobile phone tower in the Wollongong suburb of Dapto, NSW, which affected around 4,500 users in the area on Sunday between 3am and 12.20pm.

Opposition leader Sussan Ley said on Monday the “Optus crisis is getting worse here in Australia” and called for an “independent inquiry into the whole triple-zero ecosystem.” She also criticised Communications Minister Anika Wells, who accompanied Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to the United Nations General Assembly, for being overseas.

“It isn’t good enough that the minister responsible was swanning around in New York, was absent and appears missing in action on this critical matter,” Ley said.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher described the repeat incident as another discouraging sign of Optus dropping the ball.

“It’s still disappointing and, although I understand Optus did make the necessary reports over the weekend, there’s clearly more work to be done,” she told ABC News Breakfast on Monday.

“There’s questions that Optus are going to have to answer about what happened in the last fortnight, and their response to it.”

However, she maintained that Australians should have faith in the triple-zero communications system.

“We’ve seen a disruption … from Optus’ point of view over the last week with devastating effects. These are really serious deficiencies when they occur,” the minister added.

An Optus spokesperson said the telco sincerely apologises to any affected customers and said it is continuing to investigate the cause of the issue.

“Optus continues to investigate the cause of an issue involving a mobile phone tower site in the Dapto area in NSW. The issue has been restored,” the spokesperson said.

Optus has reviewed nine failed calls made to triple-zero during that time, including one instance where a caller required an ambulance and used another phone to contact emergency services.

Four other attempted triple-zero calls were referred to NSW Police for a welfare check.

The spokesperson said Optus has confirmed with police that those affected are “OK”, and the issue has been fixed.

Earlier outage linked to deaths

Optus boss Stephen Rue said human error was behind another outage earlier this month that was linked to the deaths of three Australians.

The outage occurred on 18 September when a scheduled firewall upgrade in South Australia triggered a communications outage that blocked triple-zero calls on the network in the state, as well as Western Australia, the Northern Territory and far-western NSW.

While normal calls were largely unaffected, the outage blocked around 600 triple-zero calls from connecting to emergency services.

Rue said “standard processes were not followed” regarding this outage and dismissed suggestions that the parent company, Singtel, had cut spending to the telco.

“That’s not an investment issue, that’s people not following process,” he said.

Wells has requested discussions with representatives from Singtel, who will be visiting Australia this week.

After the 18 September outage, Wells said Optus will be held accountable and has obligations to ensure emergency services calls are prioritised and go through.

“They have perpetuated a failure upon the Australian people with what has happened here. They can expect to suffer significant consequences as a result,” Wells said.

Calls for resignation

Pressure has continued to mount on the Optus chief after revelations the company had not implemented a third of the recommendations from a review of its nationwide triple-zero outage that occurred in November 2023.

Members of the Opposition and the Greens have called for Rue’s resignation, less than a year after he took the reins following the 2023 outage and a hacking incident that left millions of customers exposed to potential online fraud.

However, Singtel has remained steadfast behind Rue and the group’s chief executive, Yuen Kuan Moon, released a statement earlier this month saying the communications group continues to “fully support the Optus board and management team as they work through this incident and accelerate the changes needed”.

Asked about calls for his resignation earlier this month, Rue said “there are no words to express how sorry I am about the very sad loss of the lives”, but said the situation was not about him.

“What we have here is lives have been lost, a failure of triple-zero, processes in call centres but also in network, not being followed.”

— With additional reporting by the Australian Associated Press