Optus Criticized for Failures in Fatal Emergency Call Outage

Optus management has been sharply criticized in an independent review into September’s fatal emergency call outage, which found that a series of avoidable failures and cultural shortcomings at the Australian telecommunications company contributed to the incident.

The report by veteran executive Kerry Schott found Optus ignored basic protocols during a network update that triggered the problem, and lacked automated safeguards that should have detected failures in the emergency call system within minutes. Instead, the outage went unnoticed by senior teams for more than 13 hours, despite customers alerting the company’s call centers early in the day.