The federal government is resisting political pressure to launch a sweeping independent inquiry into the entire triple-zero system after the second Optus outage in less than a fortnight.
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said Optus was guilty of an “absolutely shocking failure” but maintained the government would await the findings of an existing probe into the besieged telco before considering further steps.
As the communications minister, Anika Wells, prepared to confront the boss of Optus’s Singaporean owner, Singtel, at a meeting on Tuesday, the federal government faced calls to come down harder on the company and examine broader potential problems with the emergency services line.
In the latest Optus outage, involving a problem with a mobile phone tower in the Illawarra region of New South Wales, affected calls between 3am and 12.20pm on Sunday, including nine calls to the triple-zero network.
Optus said it had confirmed the welfare of all callers who tried to use the triple-zero network during the outage.
The latest incident follows a catastrophic outage on 18 September, when a network firewall upgrade blocked emergency calls for Optus customers in South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of NSW.
The deaths of two people in South Australia and one in Western Australia have been linked to the outages (a fourth death – an infant in SA – was found to have been likely unrelated to the incident).
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In a statement on Monday, Singtel said the latest incident was “a type of outage that carriers … routinely encounter” and not a result of upgrade or maintenance, as the 18 September incident was.
“Given the heightened sensitivity in Australia around triple zero calls, Optus communicated this incident to demonstrate full transparency of a type of outage that carriers around the world routinely encounter,” the statement read.
The 18 September incident sparked a review from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma), which also investigated the telco after a nationwide outage in 2023.
Optus has launched its own independent review of the outage, last week appointing Dr Kerry Schott, a former Deutsche Bank managing director, to report on the incident by the end of the year.
Although Optus has committed to making the report public, the company has subsequently refused to answer questions about details around the outage, stating it would not provide a “running commentary” until the report is released.
In the wake of Sunday’s outage, and a separate incident affecting National Broadband Network customers in Western Australia on Friday, the Coalition and the Greens are urging the government to order an independent inquiry into the entire triple-zero system.
The opposition leader, Sussan Ley, said Wells should have remained in Australia last week to manage the Optus crisis rather than travel to New York to promote the government’s under-16s social media ban.
“We have had three catastrophic failures and we are calling for an independent inquiry into the whole triple-zero ecosystem,” she said.
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The Greens communications spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, backed a sweeping triple-zero inquiry as she reiterated calls for a review of Optus’s licence and independent oversight of its operations.
“It is not acceptable that this basic access to health is failing and isn’t there for hundreds of people,” she said. “This is not good enough at all. I urge the minister stop fobbing this off to the regulator and use the powers you’ve got.”
Chalmers said the federal government was holding Optus to account, maintaining that Acma was the most appropriate body to investigate.
He said the public should not lose faith in the broader triple-zero system.
“One of the reasons for that is where there has been a shocking failure – like we’ve seen with Optus – the government is getting to the bottom of it,” Chalmers said. “And Acma is the most appropriate body to conduct that very thorough investigation. Optus has clearly failed here on a number of fronts.”
On Tuesday, Wells would use a face-to-face meeting with the Singtel chief executive, Yuen Kuan Moon, to seek answers about the 18 September outage and assurances the company would comply with the Acma investigation.
The minister initiated the meeting, which was arranged prior to the latest Optus outage.
Wells has previously warned Optus to brace for “significant consequences” for the 18 September outage, following the investigation.