00:00A review into the Optus 000 outage has found gaps in process, accountability and escalation
00:08protocols. During the almost 14-hour outage, more than 600 000 calls were attempted and 75%
00:17failed. It's been linked to two deaths. Consumer affairs reporter Michael Atkin joins me now.
00:23Hi there, Michael. So what has this review found about the mistakes that Optus made
00:29during and after the outage? Yes, I've just been pouring off this newly released report to find
00:36out what it says and it talks about there being crucial mistakes made by Optus and its contractor
00:43Nokia, 10 in total, during this routine firewall upgrade and that meant that things like people
00:50weren't attending meetings, they were selecting the wrong methods and they weren't monitoring
00:55call volumes properly and redirecting calls and so it meant that for this huge time period,
01:04000 calls were failing and Optus failed to notice that that was the case for 13 hours and it goes to
01:13the warnings that the public gave Optus. So we have known for some time that five people called the Optus
01:19call centre and said 000 calls aren't working. And Dr Schott who did this review talks about having
01:27reviewed what happened after those calls and says it made for sobering listening going over those calls
01:34because all those people correctly diagnosed what was happening and yet correct action wasn't taken.
01:41And then when Optus went to go on and do welfare checks on the failed 000 calls to see how people were,
01:50that was not escalated properly up the chain of command inside the company and of course there's been a lot
01:57of political fallout and lost skin for Optus over that. So what does it say needs to change inside Optus?
02:06There's 21 recommendations for system change and a lot of it is to do with network processes, to do with
02:15things like how their engineers should operate but also to do with how it handles risk and internal audits
02:23inside the company and you know it's called for an overhaul in in the way they manage a crisis because
02:30one of the things it talks about is this massive crisis management document that Optus had and the
02:37review says well in a crisis nobody is going to read that massive document and it needs to be snappy. But
02:43I thought one of the recommendations is worth pointing out to you because it talks about broader problems
02:49with the 000 system. In particular it says that customers need to be told that in a network outage their
02:58devices may take 40 to 60 seconds to connect to 000 and that they should be encouraged to test their
03:06devices to ensure that they work properly for a 000 call. Now of course for that to happen now would
03:13be a problem because it would mean the 000 operator Telstra their call centre workers would get a lot of
03:20those calls and so it recommends setting up something else where people can actually call and test their
03:26phone and make sure that it's connecting to 000 properly. Michael what does this say about sort of
03:33broader problems within the 000 system? Well that process that I've just talked about there where it
03:40might take 40 to 60 seconds for a person's call to connect of course when you're in an emergency that would
03:47seem like an absolute eternity and the problem would be if people hang up earlier and this is a process
03:55known as camping on and it means that say the Optus network is down when you call 000 your phone
04:03on the Optus network is still meant to work it's meant to go to the Telstra network or the Vodafone network
04:10so that you can still get through to 000 and if this camp on mechanism the report says it wasn't always working
04:19as it should have during the outage and that is a real problem it goes to what we've been reporting
04:26on for months now concerns about the integrity of the 000 emergency call system and whether there needs
04:33to be a significant overhaul here
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