During a parliamentary hearing, it was revealed that one of Australia’s leading telecommunications providers, Optus, sent an important notification regarding a severe, widespread outage to the wrong email address within the Department of Communications. These critical messages remained unread for over a day.
The outage, which occurred on September 18th, has been tragically linked to four fatalities, including an infant, due to disruptions in accessing emergency services. Optus’ initial communications to the department reportedly downplayed the scale of the incident, stating that only 10 calls were affected and that the issue was fixed. However, it later emerged that over 600 emergency calls had failed during the more than 13-hour disruption.
Authorities were reportedly unaware of the full extent of the outage until the following afternoon, more than 36 hours after it began, when they received information from the industry regulator. James Chisholm, Australia’s Deputy Secretary for Communications, highlighted that the email address used by Optus for this notification was outdated, a change that Optus had been informed of two weeks prior. He also noted that Optus had failed to comply with regulations requiring the redirection of emergency calls to alternative providers during such outages.
Optus attributed the cause of the outage to a deviation from standard procedures during a routine firewall upgrade. The incident is now under investigation by Australia’s media regulator to determine if Optus, a subsidiary of Singaporean company Singtel, breached any laws. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, currently visiting Australia, has expressed his condolences and acknowledged the public’s anger and frustration, emphasizing the government’s expectation for companies to act responsibly and cooperate with investigations.
This incident adds to a series of recent controversies for Optus, following a major cyberattack in 2022 that compromised customer data and a nationwide outage in 2023 that affected millions. The company’s former CEO resigned in 2023 following the earlier outage, and current CEO Stephen Rue is facing similar pressure, with some lawmakers even calling for the revocation of Optus’ operating license.