Optus reveals more than 2,500 people tried and failed to call triple-0 from their mobiles during last November's network outage, after previously telling a Senate inquiry just 228 people were affected.
  • In short: Optus says close to 2,700 customers tried and failed to call emergency services from their mobile phones during the November 2023 network outage.
  • This number is more than 10 times higher than what the telco previously told the Senate.
  • What’s next? Optus says it is writing to each customer individually to apologise, and the federal government is conducting a post-incident review.
  • Nath@aussie.zone
    0·
    11 months ago

    Man I’d love to have beers down the pub with the engineer(s) pushing that change that night. I’m sure the story of how that incident unfolded would be insane.

    • 𝚝𝚛𝚔@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      0·
      11 months ago

      I would imagine they feel pretty shit, especially if people literally died due to the delays caused by not being able to access 000 😬

      Imagine if missing a dot in an IP or some other tiny typo caused a cascade effect that resulted in people dying. You’d carry that shit forever, even if technically it wasn’t “your” fault directly.

      • Nath@aussie.zone
        0·
        11 months ago

        Any comment I made on the cause of the incident would be pure speculation, but I’d be astonished if it were something so trivial. I suspect it more likely to be through some unknown hardware bug that didn’t happen in the Dev/Test environments for some reason. From what they have told the Senate Committee, this was a routine update. Those don’t usually carry significant risk of failure.

        So all we do know for real is that it was very unexpected and complicated to fix. Something minor like you are describing would not generally take 10 hours to roll back.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    This afternoon the telco announced it had found an additional 2,468 customers who tried to make triple-0 calls from their mobiles that did not connect to emergency services on November 8.

    The federal government confirmed that Optus had advised the information it previously provided to the Senate, the public and the regulator was “not accurate”.

    Telcos are required to conduct welfare checks on people who tried and failed to call emergency services during network outages, under regulations introduced in 2019.

    "I offer my deepest apologies to all those customers who were unable to access Triple Zero services during the outage and did not receive a follow-up check from us.

    Optus said it would update the Senate record and had already provided more information to the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (the ACMA).

    The update comes after documents obtained by the ABC revealed that the telco, the federal government and the telecommunications regulator knew customers were having problems calling triple-0 from their mobiles for hours before the public was informed.

    The original article contains 418 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!