Government steps in to run an Optus post-incident 'review'

Optus will be subjected to a government-run post-incident “review” after its near full-day telecommunications outage yesterday.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement that “it is critical the government conducts a process to identify lessons to be learned from yesterday’s outage.”

“I will task my department with developing the terms of reference for a post-incident review,” Rowland said.

“Further announcements around the terms of reference and next steps will be made in due course.”

Rowland suggested it was “critical” for both industry and governments to “take stock following large-scale outages, given no network is immune.”

“The government hopes the review may also help support major telecommunications providers to improve post-outage processes,” Rowland said.

Telcos and technology service providers generally prepare their own internal post-incident reports after major incidents; they may or may not be shared with affected parties, but they are rarely made public.

Separately, Optus faces questions from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) over problems with Triple Zero emergency calling during yesterday’s outage.

“The ACMA has independently commenced an assessment to investigate Optus’ compliance with the rules requiring that emergency calls are successfully carried from mobile carriers to the emergency call person (Telstra),” Rowland said.

Optus said “most” services had been restored as of 6.32pm AEDST last night, however there were still some residual impacts to NBN services at the time of the last update.

The approach the government takes in running its own independent post-incident investigation into Optus is likely to be closely observed, given the government was previously criticised for the nature of its interventions into the post-incident response to last year's Optus data breach.