Optus staff have faced a federal Senate inquiry into a Triple Zero service outage in September connected to three deaths.
A “technical failure” in September meant some Optus customers were unable to contact Triple Zero.
CEO Stephen Rue told the inquiry he accepted “there were mistakes made”.
Here’s what you need to know.
Background
On 18 September, Optus began a routine system upgrade. In what Rue later called a “human error,” calls were not diverted to a different part of the network while the upgrade was taking place.
This resulted in calls to Triple Zero not connecting.
Over a period of about 15 hours, 605 people tried to call Triple Zero and could not get through. Optus initially reported 10 calls were affected.
Three deaths were connected to the outages.
The incident came after a previous Optus outage in November 2023, which left millions of people without phone reception and internet, including almost 2,700 people who tried and failed to call Triple Zero.
Optus said the outage was caused by a “routine software upgrade.”
A Government-commissioned review of the outage recommended a “custodian” be appointed to oversee the Triple Zero system. The Government accepted this recommendation.
Inquiry
The Senate Communications Committee began its inquiry into the 18 September Triple Zero outage on Monday.
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According to documents Optus submitted to the inquiry, staff were aware that 10 Triple Zero calls had failed by 2.15pm on 18 September (a Thursday). By midnight, Optus was aware of 624 calls.
Rue was told of the hundreds of calls and multiple fatalities the following morning, and the Government was then made aware of the extent of the incident on Friday afternoon.
Committee deputy chair Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said to Rue: “It was more important to you... that your profits would be in order, than people’s safety and transparency with Government.”
In response, Rue said he didn’t “accept that characterisation” but agreed “there were mistakes made”.
Committee member Senator Sarah Henderson said it was “outrageous” that Optus had not applied recommendations from investigations into its November 2023 outage.
What next?
The inquiry will continue, with submissions open to members of the public until 25 November.
Speaking to the media after the hearing, Henderson said she believes Optus should “absolutely” pay compensation to the families of those impacted by the outages.
The committee will prepare a report by 11 February 2026.
The Federal Government has also introduced new measures requiring telcos to publish network outages in real-time.
These measures will be enforced by the ACMA, after Communications Minister Anika Wells wrote to the regulator last month.
Wells said the data “will increase transparency and accountability around outages and related impacts on access to TripleZero”.
Shadow Communications Minister Melissa McIntosh said the mechanism “is not transparent,” because it will be self-operated by the telcos.
