Overview
- Department officials told Senate estimates that Optus emailed required outage notices at 2:45pm and 2:52pm on September 18 to an old, unmonitored inbox, with the department only learning of the incident after ACMA phoned the next afternoon.
- Optus’ initial emails portrayed a minor issue affecting about 10 calls, but later figures showed roughly 600 emergency calls were potentially impacted and three deaths were linked to the failure.
- Officials said telcos were informed on August 27 that a new notification address would take effect on September 11, and that Optus had used the correct mailbox for other incidents before and after the change.
- Preliminary accounts attribute the disruption to a routine firewall upgrade that blocked Triple Zero calls across South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of New South Wales, preventing required fallback to other networks.
- The government introduced legislation to establish a Triple Zero custodian and summoned telco executives, while ACMA and independent reviews examine possible legal breaches and accountability.