”These obligations include ensuring that all emergency calls are successfully carried to the Triple Zero service, that welfare checks are conducted for people whose calls to Triple Zero are unsuccessful, that customers and the public receive timely and accurate information, and that relevant government agencies and other stakeholders are promptly notified of any outage,” a spokesman said.
“It is alarming that another outage has occurred so soon after the previous incident. Australians rely on Triple Zero in life-threatening situations and the ACMA will be looking closely at the circumstances of each of these incidents.”
The back-to-back failures have triggered fresh alarm from state and federal leaders across the political spectrum, with NSW Premier Chris Minns labelling the Optus outage “clearly unacceptable” and demanding “full and transparent information.”
Opposition communications spokeswoman Melissa McIntosh.Credit: Janie Barrett
Meanwhile, opposition communications spokeswoman Melissa McIntosh said the repeated breakdowns showed the system was in crisis.
“The No.1 priority for a government is to protect its citizens. But right now, we are going through a crisis when it comes to the Triple Zero network,” McIntosh said at a press conference in Sydney.
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She renewed her call for an independent inquiry into the entire Triple Zero ecosystem, warning that the current regulator, ACMA, could not credibly investigate given its role in the existing framework.
“ACMA cannot be the investigators … they were part of the issue, part of the broken process. We need an independent process,” she said.
McIntosh also called for a mandatory public register of Triple Zero outages to restore transparency and trust.
“Australians would rightly be asking, how often does this happen? I would like to see a register where all telecommunications providers have to record publicly when they have a Triple Zero outage, so Australians have that confidence,” she said.
The Greens’ communications spokeswoman, Sarah Hanson-Young, also echoed calls for a review into Triple Zero and a public register.
“Optus cannot be trusted to look after people’s safety,” she said. “The minister must step in, use her powers, and impose independent oversight immediately.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said on Monday that Australians should not lose faith in the Triple Zero system.
“This can’t happen again. This is an absolutely shocking failure from Optus, and the most appropriate course of action for the government to take to get to the bottom of this is to ask ACMA to conduct a very thorough investigation.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Telecommunications experts say the risks have been obvious for years. In 2018, a major Telstra fibre cut knocked out Triple Zero access across several states. During the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires, emergency calls were also hampered by mobile towers destroyed in fire grounds.
More recently, Optus’s nationwide outage in November 2023 triggered widespread disruption, followed by the fatal Optus Triple Zero failure this month.
Australia’s Triple Zero service is designed so that any mobile call to 000 is carried, regardless of a person’s network provider or credit balance. If a carrier’s network is down, the call should automatically “roam” onto another available network – a safeguard meant to ensure that people can always reach police, fire or ambulance.
RMIT University associate professor Mark Gregory said repeated failures showed the system was not fit for purpose.
“The exemption given by the government to the telcos limiting the notification and reporting for small outages continues to put people in regional and remote areas at risk,” Gregory said.
He argued the government should fund work to overhaul legislation and regulations, setting minimum performance standards and granting stronger enforcement powers to watchdogs.
“The ongoing engineering problems at Optus should also be justification for the minister to use her urgent licence condition power to put a technical expert into Optus to oversee remedial action and to ensure that Optus has adequate automated testing and monitoring systems in place,” he said.
SingTel chief executive Yuen Kuan Moon.Credit: Getty Images
Carol Bennett, chief executive of telco consumer group ACCAN, called for laws enabling a “Triple Zero custodian” to be fast-tracked through parliament. As this masthead previously reported, legislation is being drafted to give the regulator role, which already exists, more teeth to enforce compliance. But the window to introduce the bill this year is shrinking as parliament will sit for only four more weeks before it rises in December.
Bennett said the laws needed to be introduced as soon as possible.
“Before these devastating outages, Optus was already facing major consumer trust issues. Now this lack of trust is spreading to damage confidence in our emergency service system itself,” she said.
“Australians are seeing a repeat of failures to provide the reliable service that they need and deserve. The communications minister must act and use carrier licence conditions to mandate independent technical oversight of Optus’ emergency and network reliability systems. This would provide some assurance that there is strict oversight preventing further failures.”
The crises have amplified warnings from consumer advocates and telecommunications experts who say Australia’s emergency call network – established in 1961 – is outdated and increasingly vulnerable to human error and technical faults, particularly as bushfire season approaches.
“Australians do need to have confidence in [the country’s] most essential service,” McIntosh said.
“We’re approaching summer, where we have natural disasters, but regardless, just in everyday life, you need to be able to pick up the phone and make that call.”
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