South Australia’s ambulance service was signed up to a new system that is supposed to send notifications when Optus has a triple zero outage, but says it was not notified during the outage last month.
September’s triple zero outage was caused by a network firewall upgrade which blocked emergency calls for Optus customers in South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of New South Wales.
The outage has been linked to the deaths of two people in SA and one in WA. A fourth death, of an infant in SA, was found to be likely unrelated.
After the Richard Bean-led review of the Optus 2022 outage, telcos were ordered to provide real-time notifications to emergency services from 1 November this year. As Guardian Australia reported last week, Optus had been providing these notifications to emergency services that had signed up since the end of June.
In an opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review on Thursday, Wells said the new scheme to “share real-time network information detailing outages with relevant emergency services organisations and other appropriate entities … is on track to commence in full next month as planned”.
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However, Guardian Australia can reveal the SA Ambulance service signed up to receive Optus’s notifications but did not receive a notification during last month’s outage.
“SAAS is signed up for notifications and did not receive any such notifications from Optus during the outage last week,” a spokesperson said.
The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, told the ABC last month that SA emergency services themselves informed Optus of the outage.
“They saw a drop off in the number of triple zero calls coming through on a particular line. They contacted South Australian police … and then Optus was alerted,” he said.
“Now what’s supposed to happen under the protocol is if a carrier has a technical issue in respect to triple zero, there’s redundancy that clicks in, and then they inform the emergency services authorities. That didn’t happen.”
NT emergency services had yet to sign up for the notifications and WA emergency services did not respond to a request for comment.
Optus refused to comment last week, saying that while the independent review led by Dr Kerry Schott is under way “we will respect this process and will not provide a running commentary”.
The spokesperson said the Optus board has committed to releasing Schott’s report.
Following the 2022 Optus cyber-attack, the then chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said a Deloitte report commissioned on the attack may “also help others in the private and public sector where sensitive data is held and [a] risk of cyber-attack exists”.
However, Optus then opted to keep the report a secret, fighting and losing a ruling on releasing the report in the federal court in 2023. It then appealed and lost the appeal on that ruling last year.
Optus earlier this year argued that real-time notifications for outages would impose a “huge burden” on staff.
Wells said the government will soon introduce legislation to establish a triple zero custodian to oversee the emergency call system.
Guardian Australia learned last week the government had sat on a report from a steering committee led by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) on the structure of the role since November last year.
Wells said on Thursday the role was established in her department in March this year, but the legislation will strengthen the custodian’s powers.
