Australian telco Optus says its staff may not have followed established processes when a firewall upgrade they conducted resulted in customers not being able to call emergency services for 14 hours – a period during which it is thought three of the carrier’s customers died after trying to seek help, according to the company’s CEO.
CEO Stephen Rue said the company upgraded the firewall at around 12:30AM on September 18.
“Initial testing and monitoring did not indicate there were any issues with calls connecting – normal calls were connecting as they should and call volumes at a national level did not raise any red flags,” he said.
Australia’s equivalent of the USA’s 911 and the UK’s 999 and 112 emergency contact number is 000 – Triple Zero – and local law requires all telcos to route emergency calls to that number.
Two customers contacted Optus’s call center early on Thursday to report that calls to 000 had not gone through. “As we had not detected the Triple Zero failures in our network at the time of these calls, there were no red flags for the contact centre to alert them to any live issues,” Rue said.
Optus is searching call center logs and as of Sunday believes at least three other customers reported the outage.
But it was not until a customer reported the problem at 13:30 on Thursday that Optus “became aware of the severity of the incident.”
Australian law requires carriers to check the welfare of customers after any 000 outages. After Optus did so, it identified three deaths linked to customers who may have tried to call emergency services for help.
In a Sunday statement Rue said the company is speaking to staff who performed the upgrade to understand why they did not follow procedures. He also vowed to implement an escalation process for any reports of problems with calls to Triple Zero.
Rue has expressed remorse for those impacted by the incident.
Australian politicians have expressed disappointment with Optus, which was the victim of a major data breach in 2022 and experienced a lengthy and extensive outage in 2023. ®
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