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Optus can “expect to suffer significant consequences” as the telecommunications regulator launches its investigation into the network’s outage, which may have led to three deaths.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said Optus will be held accountable for the outage 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 told reporters on Monday morning.
What penalties could Optus face?
Wells said the government is working to understand the factors that led to the breach, announcing that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has launched an investigation into the incident.
“This is the second significant and egregious failure on the part of Optus. But also, other telecommunications providers have had triple-zero outages as well. This is not entirely a matter for Optus,” she said.
ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said the authority will be seeking significant information from Optus.
“We will need time to dig into what has exactly happened here,” she said on Monday.
“We will, as the regulator, be holding Optus to account for this second outage over the last couple of years.”
O’Loughlin referenced a previous Optus outage in 2023, which prompted the then-CEO to resign and led to the company facing penalties of over $12 million.
“We didn’t expect to be here again so soon, less than two years after that breach,” she said.
While the law doesn’t allow for criminal convictions over the Optus outage, there could be financial penalties, according to O’Loughlin.
“I won’t speculate on the size of penalties because they are complicated, in terms of the number of contraventions, but there are $19,000 per infringement notice, and the court can impose up to $250,000 per contravention,” she said.
Optus CEO Stephen Rue said over the weekend the company takes “full accountability” for the breach.
“We take full accountability for the technical failure and that we were unaware of this for … an unacceptable gap in time.”
Speaking to reporters in New York on Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Optus’s behaviour is “completely unacceptable, we have made that very clear”.
“There’ll be a proper investigation by the authorities and the government has action at its disposal, but the immediate concern will be that investigation.”
