Optus penalised $12m for Triple Zero failures

Optus and its subsidiaries were penalised $12 million for Triple Zero call failures during its major outage a year ago, as well as for not performing welfare checks.

The penalty was imposed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) following an investigation.

Optus admitted to the scale of the problems in January this year and apologised.

ACMA said the penalties were for 2145 people whose emergency calls failed during the outage, and for the telco not conducting welfare checks on 369 people 

Its chair Nerida O’Loughlin said the size of the penalty “reflected the critical nature of the breaches”.

“Triple Zero availability is the most fundamental service telcos must provide to the public,” O’Loughlin said.

“Our findings [pdf] indicate that Optus failed in the management of its network in a number of areas and that the outage should have been preventable.” 

ACMA contends that Optus should have configured its core routers to be able to handle the unexpected increase in routing information they received that day from an upstream source, and not relied on the routers' default settings.

It also argued Optus had insufficient out-of-band (OOB) network capabilities it could use for diagnostic and administrative purposes in the event of an outage.

ACMA noted that “other failings by Optus during the outage were identified in a post-incident review that the government commissioned.

“Beyond the penalties announced today by the ACMA, the Optus outage has directly led to changes for industry regulatory obligations in relation to emergency call services,” O’Loughlin said.