When the latest triple zero outage occurred on July 7 it took 44 minutes for Telstra to inform the Triple Zero Custodian, as it’s legally obliged to do, a Senate inquiry has heard.
The Environment and Communications References Committee is examining the latest in a series of telco outages which prevented people from being connected to emergency services.
An Optus outage in February this year—attributed by its CEO to a “culture of carelessness”—cost the lives of four people.
While last week’s incident isn’t reported to have led to any fatalities, 604 people were affected.
Telstra earlier said that 172 of those had successfully contacted emergency service when their call was rerouted through Optus or Vodafone’s networks—a process known as “camping on” or emergency roaming.
It’s not clear what happened to the remainder, which may have failed to switch networks or who were possibly in areas where Telstra was the only network.
A Telstra executive told the committee that staff first became aware there was a failure in its triple zero infrastructure around 6.30 a.m. that morning.
That surprised Triple Zero Custodian Clare Chapple who is also an assistant secretary at the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, and Communications.
She told senators she wasn’t officially notified of the outage until 7:14 a.m.
The department had realised something was wrong when its own duty officer, who monitors networks, noticed her own Telstra phone wasn’t working around 7.00 a.m. and alerted Chapple.
Jennie Hood, assistant secretary at the custodian, said the duty officer then checked the crowdsourced outage report website downdetector.com.au—which Telstra also admitted to using to check for network faults.
When she found multiple messages about a service interruption, including people complaining of not being able to contact triple zero, she then “messaged some Telstra contacts to confirm if what we were seeing was an indication of a major outage.”
“That 7.14 email was the first email that we received, although I have heard in evidence just before that there were a number of indicators earlier than that,” Hood said.
Officials from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA, the telco regulator) also gave evidence.
Chair Nerida O’Loughlin said that if its investigation determined the events that led to the outage included substantial regulatory breaches, it could take Telstra to the Federal Court, which has the power to impose civil penalties of up to $30 million per contravention.
Whether the 44-minute delay before informing the custodian met the requirements of the law is one of the issues ACMA will examine during its inquiry into the incident, O’Loughlin said.
“So we will be looking carefully at all the communications that were provided by Telstra, particularly with their customers, to see if that complies with those standards,” she said.
ACMA itself was notified of the outage at 7.25 a.m. that morning, and O’Loughlin said Telstra’s submission, which said the agency had attended a “partner bridge” meeting at 7.20 a.m., was not correct.
Telstra’s CEO Vicki Brady was overseas when the outage occurred.
The telco sacked more than 100 people and merged two of its biggest technology divisions in a May restructure, but executives denied that this had any impact on the failure two months later.
A year ago, Communications Minister Anika Wells introduced legislation the government said would strengthen the reliability, transparency, and oversight of the network, giving ACMA greater powers to not only investigate failures but to direct telecommunications carriers to take actions necessary to prevent system failures.
