Optus ‘let our customers down’ with over 2,600 missed Triple 0 calls during outage

Optus miscounted the number of Triple Zero calls to emergency services by more than ten times during its November outage, stating that it “let our customers down”.

During the days following the outage, Optus initially claimed to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the Senate and in statements to the public that 229 calls from mobiles to Triple Zero were unable to connect. In fact, the figure was at least 2,697, according to the telco’s own review.

According to Minister for Communication Michelle Rowland, Optus said it will start contacting impacted customers, with the government adding that it “conveyed its expectation this occur expeditiously”.

The new information will also be considered by ACMA as part of its investigation into Optus’ compliance with the Telecommunications (Emergency Call Provider) Determination 2019.

In its own statement, Optus said it will continue to cooperate with investigations by the government, the Senate and ACMA into the outage.

“Optus will also appoint an independent third party to undertake a review of our processes supporting our welfare check obligations. We will commit to implement any recommendations of this independent review and share the findings with the ACMA and the Senate committee,” the company said.

“We are contacting each customer individually to apologise and provide the opportunity to discuss their specific circumstances and whether there is anything we can do to assist them further. We know we let our customers down and we are committed to addressing our learnings from the outage.”

The discovery of 2697 failed Triple Zero calls comes months after the outage, which was chalked up to a software upgrade and the subsequent “changes to routing information”.

Two weeks later, the federal government launched its review into the outage, which was to focus on the effects on Triple Zero calls and the government’s own management and response to national service outages.