ACMA altering outage data handling as public register nears

The communications regulator will "refine" its procedures for handling increasing volumes of carrier outage notification data as it prepares for the arrival of the Triple Zero Guardian and the incoming public outage register.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) last week told the triple zero inquiry that it has been managing "a large volume [of notification] information" since announcing changes to outage reporting rules in December 2024, and then again in June this year.

After giving its evidence, the ACMA told iTnews that it was working with stakeholders and “particularly” the new Triple Zero Custodian to the find best way to efficiently manage and use information in the notifications.

“This includes consideration of the role of the new public outages register that the Minister for Communications announced on October 27 2025 to complement the existing notification obligations,” a spokesperson for the ACMA said.

The spokesperson was responding to iTnews’ questions about evidence that ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin gave to the inquiry last Monday.

O’Loughlin and a line-up of her most senior staff were facing intense scrutiny about the agency’s handling of Optus’ reports about its emergency service outage in September.

They included deputy chair Michael Brealy, licensing and infrastructure chief Allan Major, and the regulator’s consumer division head, Catherine Rainsford.

Partly repeating evidence that she gave during a previous estimates hearing, O’Loughlin said carriers had been sending it a large volume outage notices and data on a regular basis since the reporting rules started to change about 11 months ago.

She told the committee the authority was trying to find ways to uncover “red flags” amid the mountain of emails and other often duplicate notices.

“With the changes, particularly around significant local outages and the major outages, and the notification provisions under there, we are getting ... a large amount of information on a daily basis.

“Some of those may be very small outages in local areas that don't come to any effect on people, but there's a lot of information and data, and particularly as [Catherine] Rainsford said, [when] we might be getting multiple emails about [what] has happened, but then we found out something else has happened,” she said.

O’Loughlin was responding to questions about the way Optus chose to report the outage during its early stages, in particular its extent and what and when it knew about fatalities that were later linked to the outage.

“This is the resolution we need to look at internally about how we manage that data more effectively,” she continued.

“That is something we're talking to the Department [of Communications] about – how we can manage [the notification data] better, so that those red flags appear more quickly to us, rather than us trawling through multiple emails every day”.

The authority chief said it is still “a work in progress”.

Carriers are currently required to report outages to customers and other stakeholders under a mix of laws and supporting codes and standards that deal emergency call service breakdowns.

The Telecommunications (Emergency Call Service) Determination 2019 (ECSD), the longest standing and most relevant, was designed to ensure Australia’s emergency call services operate reliably.

It’s been amended several times in response to investigations into previous outages that have crippled triple zero services, including the review into the November 8 2023 Optus service breakdown, which returned its recommendations in March 2024.

However, since 2019, the ECSD has required carriers to notify Emergency Call Personnel (ECPs) of large outages, carry out welfare checks on individuals whose calls to first responders failed during them, and keep emergency call services free of pranks and other disruptive calls.

The ACMA also recently amended it to tighten up mobile phone and network equipment testing rules.

Under a new instrument, the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024, from December 31 2024 carriers have been required to report “major” unplanned telecommunications outages.

Major is defined as an outage that impacts more than 100,000 services, or all services across an entire state or territory, lasting longer than 60 minutes.

It requires carriers to update customers, the public at large and federal government officials about the status of an outage every six hours in its first 24 hours and then once every 24 hours until it is over.

In June the following year, ACMA extended the standard to cover “significant local outages”, classified as disruptions impacting more than 1000 services expected to persist for more than six hours in regional areas and more than 250 services for longer than three hours in remote areas.

ACMA’s Rainsford gave evidence to the inquiry that it is not yet clear whether the two new definitions specifically deal with triple zero services in the case of the Optus' September 18 outage.

Victorian Liberal Senator, Sarah Henderson, expressed concern that the new standard for major outages and significant local outages had given way to a regulatory 

"I want to cut to the chase here, and I want to put to you very clearly that the changes in the rules that [applied] from the first of November arguably would not capture a triple zero service failure like what occurred on the 18th of September," Senator Henderson said.

O'Loughlin told Senator Henderson that the authority would "look into the issue".

ACMA is currently carrying out an investigation into the Optus outage and it’s one of the most pivotal questions that the agency will have to answer.

Tough questions for Optus

Appearing immediately before ACMA officials last Monday, Optus faced tough questions about why it initially appeared to play down the severity of the outage.

Of particular concern, the committee aggressively grilled Optus chief Stephen Rue and his team of executives about the timeline of events immediately after the September 18 outage started, including when the carrier notified officials in ACMA and the Department of Communications of its full extent and that it could be linked to fatalities.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young cut to the thrust of committee’s key concerns almost straight away. To Rue she asked:

“So, you [Rue] find out at quarter past eight in the morning that people had died. It took you until 2.30pm to call the ACMA chair, the regulator, and then took you until four o'clock to speak with the minister or to inform the minister. What on earth were you doing between eight, 8am in the morning, and two and 2pm or 2.30(pm)?” 

Rue told the committee that he was ensuring the carrier was completing welfare checks and that it had accurate information about missed calls, but Hanson-Young persisted with the line of questioning.

“You weren't doing the welfare checks, Mr. Rue. You had other people doing that. What were you doing? Why hadn't you called the government and told them what was actually going on,” she asked again.

“I was in a series of meetings with my team to ensure that we had the we had activities such as the network was restored....the welfare checks were being completed. When you have a situation like this, the job is to make sure that you have all the activities in place, including ensuring that we had the list of the people that we needed to discuss [the outage] with,” Rue responded.

Not satisfied with the answer, Senator Hanson-Young pointed out that Rue wasn’t too busy to contact Singtel’s CEO, Yuen Kuan Moon and other senior board executives of Optus' and its Singapore-based parent company.

“You called the CEO of SingTel almost straight away, didn't you, at about 8:52am? Half an hour after you were informed you called the board? You contacted many of the members of both SingTel and the Optus board, so you made sure the board knew. But you didn't call the minister or the regulator,” Hanson-Young noted, hoping for a confirmation.

Rue obliged, telling the committee that it was his responsibility to notify the board as part of the carrier’s standard procedures.

“It is (a) normal process in in an organisation such as Optus to ensure the board is fully informed of the of what I know at the time and what activities we are doing to ensure we gather all the facts,” he told the committee.

But Senator Hanson-Young put it to the chief executive that he left the government and regulator in the dark to buy time for the carrier for the carrier to "get its ducks in order”.

“The information that your organisation had told (the ACMA) the day before was wrong, and you let it sit there being wrong – devastatingly wrong, deadly wrong – for well over six hours. I just don't think that is good enough,” she said.

Rue said that he didn’t accept the senator’s characterisation of his conduct but admitted that “there were delays and mistakes made”.

“[The] judgment I had was that it was best to get the information accurately together and then inform the regulator, the department and the (communications) minister's office,” he said.

The hearing continues.