I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. The Communications Watchdog has opened a formal investigation into Optus after a thirteen hour failure blocked about six hundred Triple zero calls, now linked to three deaths. The government is furious, calling it completely unacceptable and warning of significant consequences. But is it actually their fault too? Today journalist and contributor to Cracky Michael Sainsbury on what went wrong and how the
government's choices led to this disaster. It's Friday, September twenty six, So, Michael, last week hundreds of Australians discovered that they couldn't get through when they tried to call Triple zero with catastrophic and we now know some fatal consequences. So tell me about what we know about what was happening with Optus's network while this was going on.
So it was just a regular network upgrade and the telto networks thirty thousands of these a week, so there's all sorts of stuff they're doing every day. There's obviously thousands of base stations across the country.
They're very sophisticated.
Software systems that connect those things to the fiber optics underground to the big computers that go out to your phone. So that's very very complex networks and there's always stuff going on. This was a regular sort of upgrade that went wrong.
Today it was revealed the deadly outage the result of a botch firewall upgrade that lasted thirteen hours, six hundred customers across three states without access to Triple zero.
The outage only affected people in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia. Initially they thought it affected about six hundred calls made to emergency serve.
Good evening, we have a major story developing as we go to wear. Just moments ago, we learned that three people have died during a major Optus network outage that affected Triple zero calls.
Something in their processes was either bad, could have been a badly written.
Piece of software, or it could just.
Have been a very simple human era where things just weren't followed properly and weren't checked. If it had been a national thing, again, that may have been picked up more quickly by a system. But do those systems have enough red flags? It sounds like they don't.
Okay, And I mean you can see how these things might happen, But you would assume that in the case of human error or a bad update, that there would be a backup, something would kick in if a network you know isn't working like this, particularly when it comes to triple zero calls. So what should have.
Happened, Well, there is actually a backup across all of the networks in Australia where if for some reason your networks aren't connecting to the Triple I SO system, the calls will be routed into Celster or voter Phone so
they can access that system. Now, the TRILEO system is actually run by Chelster under contract to the government, so all the calls go into a call center Atchelster, which is known as Triple O or the Emergency Call Person Officially, what seems to have happened is that the customers and optists were able to make normal calls, but they weren't able to make triple zero calls and this wasn't flagged immediately.
There were also people who rang and at least five people possibly more rang office call centers to tell them that the Triple O wasn't working. And again there was a failure of process there that that wasn't escalated straight away.
The customers tried five times to warn the company that emergency calls were not going through.
In the past few hours has confirmed those complaints were received by its offshore call center. Now it's Fokes, just an engineer one of the other networks, and he said the Triple O. When they've got a checklist of network up grags, Triplo is absolutely the top of the list. It should be the first thing that's checked in, double checked before anything happens, and that didn't happen.
So in the wake of all of this, there are a lot of questions being asked about Optus and about its governance. So tell me about the company and how it is responding to this particular outage.
Most people probably know it's the second biggest solcon in Australia, it's the second biggest mobile network. It's owned by Singaportegal Communications, so it's not a publicly listed company in Australia, and the Singapore tell Forms is owned by Singapore government, so ultimately Singapore's responsible for everything that happens at Altus. But this is not the first time this is happen. This happened with Optus two years ago.
We have more on that breaking news on the massive Optors outage.
Ten million OPTS customers are still without mobile and broadband services amid a massive nationwide out There is a lot developing.
There was a government inquiry.
The Federal government has released the terms of reference of an investigation into this month's major optispoutage.
The eighteen recommendations handed down.
At its core is ensuring the integrity of the Triple zero service and that it continues to operate effectively in the interests of all Australians.
That process hasn't been finished properly.
Only about two thirds of those recommendations have been implemented. In some of the key ones had not been implemented. And then a year before that outage, they had that dreadful data breach where the data about nine million people was stolen. Head of OPTAs says she is devastated by the cyber attack which has potentially compromised the personal information
of nearly ten million customers. But yeah, Octus now has got very much a reputation of being a company that is kind of making some big technical fails every couple of years. Stephen Rue is the CEO who was brought in about nine months ago they got rid of the last CEO who was in charge of those last two disasters. He came from NBN, so he's pretty familiar with self communications networks and he's pretty familiar with dealing with government, so it's kind of a dent in his record early on.
I want to offer a sincere apology to all customers who could not connect to emergency services when they needed them most.
But nine months is not a hell of a lot of time in a big company like I've just to fix things. There's obviously some deep seated cultural problems of just that allow these sorts of process issues to happen.
Nevertheless, we did hear the Prime Minister Anthony Albanezi saying that he would be surprised if Stephen Rue the CEO, wasn't considering his position.
I'd be surprised if that wasn't occurring.
We also heard from the Communications Minister Annika Wells talking about accountability and concert quences. Optis and all telecommunications providers have obligations under Australian law to make sure emergency services calls go through the South Australian Premier Peter Melanaskis called it incompetence.
I mean the fact that optics were crafting media.
Statements and arranging press conferences.
Without alerting satisfy anibalance service.
About this, tell me what you make of the political response.
It was pretty fast and it's pretty brutal.
Look, people die, So I think political leaders feels that they have to react. But we we are, as you know, living in a world where it's very much blame first, asked questions later, and I just don't think it's terribly helpful when you've got politicians, you know, talking about significant consequences.
They want to sound tough.
There's a whole lot of legislation around these sorts of things, and there are some pretty hefty fines that the companies can get, and I think I've just has been fined ten and twelve million dollars I think for the last two of it's problems.
That being said, for big companies.
Like these, with bigions of dollars of revenue every year, you know, those sorts of fines are kind of slaps on the wrists too. So we've seen problems in banking, we've seen problems with quanscious, and there've been some pretty hefty fines. But they don't really make a big dent in those big companies. But this triple zero problem keeps coming up, and when governments tend to just coast along and people.
Say, well, yeah, this is very serious. People could die.
Until someone dies, nothing seems to happen, So they tend to be very reactive, and I think it's probably time that the government had a bit of a bigger look at this. So you've got inaction by the government on quite a lot of things as well as the chelcos, So it's really it's kind of a joint responsibility in a lot of ways, but ultimately, for something as critical as this, the government kind of got to be the last.
Person standing.
Coming up. Why the government is dragging its feet on recommendations that could have prevented this. Michael, I want to talk a little more about the government's role here, because while it is clear that Optus failed, what is the government's responsibility in ensuring that triple zero calls can always get through?
Once upon a time, it wasn't tevery long ago. We had one chelco, which was Telecom Australia.
That changed at Telstra last year.
Australia's Telecom invested more in Australia and Australian made products than any other company. It was privatized and how government competition was introduced before that, which is how we got off just and we've had a reasonably competitive environment in the child communications sector, although you know, the incumbent still
is the one that makes soll profits. But yeah, these sorts of critical infrastructure services like telecommunications, energy, there was a lot of privatization that went on without enough accountability coming back. I mean, we did have the inquiry into Optus, but the fact that eighteen months after that, all of those recommendations have not been fulfilled. It's supposed to have occurred, they haven't, and this is all about a lack of urgency.
I think most of the funding for triple zero comes either directly from the government or from a government levy that's from the telcos, So that triple zero stuff is actually government responsibility.
And improving that system was part of what came out.
Of that the previous office outage, and the government you know, let it linger, and so I think they do bear some responsibility here.
Yeah, tell me more about that. As you say, when this happened in the past, it triggered an inquiry the bean review. So why do you think it is that that has not resulted in the change would be needed to have prevented what has just occurred.
Yeah, there are eighteen recommendations about a whole bunch of stuff. The harder stuff was still not being implemented, particularly this setting up of the Tripoo custodian inside the department, and that to me seems like a really tea recommendation that you've actually got someone that is really having a good look at the system, talking to the telcos making sure their testing is right Now. I think Anacot Well said that has been set up, but it's actually not yet underway.
What that actually means I don't know, but clearly it's not working yet. And you would think that eighteen months after something like that happened. For that not to be in place after eight months, I think is that's a little bit of a shame you on the government and.
The Communications Minister. Anika Wells. She's fairly new to that portfolio, So what sense do you get of her of how likely she is to look into these issues.
Well, certainly to sharpen up her interest in the portfolio. Look, people inside the sector have said that she's not as engaged with the sector as the previous minister who did have a background in telecoms. Indeed, if you look back to the previous ministers, we had Paul Fletcher for quite some time in the coalition government before Mishare Royland, Mitch Firefield before him, and Malcolm Turnbull. All of those people did have quite a lot of experience or background in
either telcos or technology. Amateur Wells doesn't have any of that experience. And telecoms is a very very very complex business. I mean, as we talked about this, with a mobile network, then you've got landline Netwilson that you've got to run internet services. There's customer call centers, there's marketing, there's office and talk to have a bunch of shops. So they're
vertically integrated businesses with lots of different moving parts. And it requires a very engaged minister and staff and department to make sure that the companies that are looking after telecommunications are doing their jobs properly. And this incident, and it's such a dreadful thing when you know people are dead because infrastructure fails, but this incident really should make I think the government have a very good look at
what's happening in telecommunications. It's always been problematic because we have such a huge country with not too many people, so it's expensive compared to somewhere like Hong Kong or
Singapore to provide communications infrastructure in Australia. The only thing that can stop this happening is for companies like Office and Telster and Votefone and the other big telecommunications companies TPG to make sure all their processes work, to make sure they've got fail saved and back up and all that sort of thing, and just look at it through
what happened with the NBN. Yeah, successive governments were very frustrated that the big telecommunications companies weren't rolling up out fast enough broadband quickly enough, so they took the decision in the end to use public money to build the NBN.
Perhaps they need to have a look at the mobile networks as well, which would take a lot of the pain away from companies trying to service a handful of people very far away that puts a lot of money, and just to take some of that financial pressure off the networks so they can really focus on getting these things right.
The things that they're supposed to be doing well.
Michael, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you very much. Really.
Also in the news today, Anthony Albanezi has addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, using the occasion to renew Australia's push for a seat on the UN Security Council ahead of elections in June twenty twenty eight. The Security Council has five permanent members China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, with ten other
countries selected for two year terms. The last time Australia sat on the Council was in twenty fourteen, occupied by then Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Liberal Front venture Andrew Hasty has brushed off suggestions that he's a threat to Susan Lee's leadership after a series of outspoken social media posts. Andrew Hasty has grown increasingly outspoken on a number of policy issues in recent weeks, campaigning against net zero, on migration and domestic manufacturing. Seven Am is a daily show
from Solstice Media. It's made by Atticus Bastow, Chris Dengate, Daniel James, Sarah mcvee, Travis Evans, Zaltfecho and me Ruby Jones at the music is by nd Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio. Thanks for listening, Seeing sake