Australia is being urged to tame the “wild west” culture plaguing the telco industry after Optus experienced another serious triple-zero outage.
The major outage has been linked to four deaths and was the second time in two years an Optus network issue prevented Australians accessing the emergency line.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue faces mounting pressure to step down after revelations the telco giant failed to implement recommendations from a review into the company’s previous outage in 2023.
While telecommunications expert Mark Gregory believes there’s a strong rationale for him to step down, the problem goes beyond one company.
“The self-regulatory environment that the telecommunications industry has been under for the past 30 years isn’t working,” the RMIT University associate professor told AAP on Monday.
“We’ve had failure after failure after failure.
“Unless the government is prepared to introduce new legislation and regulations, then this culture of the wild west and having cowboys in charge is not going to change.”
Thursday’s outage, which Optus only publicised late on Friday, came 18 months after rival Telstra also failed to comply with emergency call rules during a triple-zero network disruption.
Federal Communications Minister Anika Wells vowed Optus would face the consequences of its actions, noting this was not only a matter for one company.
“This is the second significant and egregious failure,” she told reporters on Monday.
“We are now considering what needs to be done holistically or as part of legislative relief.”
The Australian Communications and Media Authority is investigating the latest incident and could seek commitments from Optus to improve its processes.
Optus was slapped with more than $12 million in penalties after its first outage and could be subject to similar fines again, communications watchdog chair Nerida O’Loughlin said.
But Assoc Prof Gregory urged the authority to seek a fine in the hundreds of millions of dollars, given Optus is a repeat offender.
He called on the federal government to implement regulation and legislation to introduce minimum performance standards for telcos and strengthen the powers of regulatory bodies so they can hold the industry to account.
The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network has called on the Labor government to appoint an independent technical expert to oversee Optus’s triple-zero capability.
Early investigations into Thursday’s incident appeared to show established processes were not followed.
A botched firewall update blocked hundreds of triple-zero calls from Optus customers in SA, WA and the NT.
The company’s lack of timely and accurate communication has also been criticised.
Ms Wells said she received an email about the outage affecting 10 calls on Thursday afternoon.
Her office received no further information until 24 hours later, when it was told the outage had affected 600 calls.
It wasn’t until the department had gotten in contact that she found out about the deaths.
Mr Rue leaned on an independent investigation into the incident when asked how Optus could be trusted in the future.
“We will make the facts public, and I can assure you, we will be implementing everything,” he said.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the Optus outage was “completely unacceptable”.
Federal opposition communications spokeswoman Melissa McIntosh said it was “an absolutely disgraceful failure”.
Two customers contacted Optus call centres early on Thursday morning, before the outage was fixed 13 hours later.
A review uncovered three more calls over the issue but “red flags” were not raised because call volumes were normal, Mr Rue said.
An eight-week-old boy from Gawler West, north of Adelaide, was among the deaths linked to the fault.
But SA Police say the outage was “unlikely to have contributed” to his death because his grandmother immediately used another phone to contact triple zero after her initial call failed.
The other deaths include a 68-year-old woman from Adelaide and two men aged 74 and 49 from Perth.
As of Monday afternoon, shares in Optus’s parent Singtel had fallen by two per cent on the Singaporean exchange.
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