Optus initiates change freeze on "network system"

Optus CEO Stephen Rue has placed “an immediate halt to further changes in our network system”, pending a review and updates to its change processes.

The halt is the most substantive action to emerge on Sunday, days after the telco experienced a 13-hour failure to its ability to carry Triple Zero calls following a firewall upgrade and rollback.

Rue said Sunday that “in relation to the cause of the upgrade failure, early investigations show that it appears that established processes were not followed.”

“In order to establish why this occurred, we are speaking with the individuals involved,” he said.

“In the short term, I have put in place an immediate halt to further changes in our network system until we have a broader understanding of the events that have occurred so that we can introduce greater monitoring, testing and compliance, and reviews of our change processes.”

Rue repeatedly said Sunday there had been process-related failures, both in the upgrade of the firewall, and in the telco’s response. 

He indicated that a new escalation process has been put in place in the company’s call centres, which received early warning from customers that Triple Zero was not working, but did not pass this intelligence on.

It was known that two customers had tried to alert Optus to the problems about 9am on Thursday; Rue said an analysis of call logs showed five customers in total reported issues to an Optus call centre.

However, as there were no known issues with the network at the time, call centre operators tried to contain the calls and live-troubleshoot the issue for customers, and the pattern of problem reports was not detected.

Because there was no indication of a general network issue, what the operators did was try and troubleshoot, but we’re now implementing a new compulsory escalation process following any customer reports of Triple Zero failures,” Rue said.

Rue confirmed that all reports of issues were made to contact centre agents based offshore.

Whether or not that played a part in the importance of the issues not being recognised and escalated formed a key tenet of questions put to Rue on Sunday, who said the location of its customer service operations “is not really a topic for today.”

“The topic is around our processes and ensuring that the processes are in place,” he said.