Telco watchdog fines Optus $12 million over massive outage last year

Optus has been fined 12-million dollars after thousands of customers were unable to call triple zero during last year's unprecedented network outage.

Transcript

00:00Any Optus customer doesn't need reminding, so for millions of Australians they couldn't

00:07access phone or internet services and it caused chaos across the country basically and the

00:13outage lasted for up to 14 hours and it was significant.

00:18People couldn't do their work, they couldn't study, they couldn't call loved ones.

00:22Optus has been fined $12 million and that's because more than 2,100 customers couldn't

00:29call 000.

00:31Now during an outage 000 is meant to work anyway on other networks and that failed and

00:38also not only that, after the outage was over Optus has an obligation to do welfare checks

00:46on people who tried to call 000 and couldn't and the regulator has found that it failed

00:52to do so in more than 360 cases and we've interviewed people in this situation.

00:59We spoke to a Gold Coast cancer patient who was having a medical episode and said he couldn't

01:05call 000 for some time and he was seeking an ambulance and he also claimed that Optus

01:13did not contact him to conduct a welfare check.

01:16So these are the sorts of very serious situations that people were in and say Optus let them

01:22down.

01:23They say they've conducted an internal review and that has led to changes in processes and

01:29systems to deal with emergency calls during an outage.

01:34They also say they're working with the government, there was a great deal of hand wringing after

01:39the outage given its significance about whether regulation of the sector was up to scratch

01:46and the government commissioned a review and there was also a Senate inquiry and the

01:52review recommended that there be increased standards placed on telcos not only about

01:58the resilience of their networks to try and make it so these sort of major events are

02:04much less common but also around communication.

02:08People also will remember that Optus was very poor in its communication to the public

02:16and to government about what was going on on the day of the outage.

02:20They relied on social media updates largely in the early stages and very brief statements

02:28to the media and didn't do press conferences and there weren't a lot of interviews particularly

02:35in the first few hours of the day and it left the public and government really scrambling

02:41to understand what was happening and so there's going to be obligations placed on telcos about

02:47just how they communicate better with the public but also with government.

02:52The government's still working through those things but I think it taps into a much greater

02:57conversation that is being had now with consumer groups saying that they're really unhappy

03:03with the way telecommunications is regulated, they want more direct regulation in the sector

03:10and there's been some pushback from the sector on that saying that in some cases industry

03:16codes are acceptable and govern enough of this.

03:20So I think there's going to be continuously this push and pull as to whether in fact the

03:27public is protected adequately in the telecommunications sector.

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