A government-ordered investigation of the 14-hour nationwide Optus outage will examine its impact on the triple zero system and whether rival telcos can offer access to their services during network shutdowns.
But the cause of the 8 November outage and the adequacy of the company’s compensation to millions of affected customers will not be examined.
On Monday the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, announced the terms of reference for the review into the outage, which took down mobile and internet services for close to one-third of the country and led to disrupted train services, payments problems and forced some businesses to close.
The review will examine how the triple zero system functioned during the outage and what changes might be needed to ensure it continues to operate. Optus had said 228 people were unable to connect to triple-zero services during the outage but a later welfare check found they were all OK.
The inquiry will also look at the government’s responsibility during such outages, along with the adequacy of Optus communications on the day of the outage and the customer complaints and compensation processes.
It will also examine how other providers might be relied upon to support a network subject to a major outage.
Richard Bean, a former deputy chair of the Australian Communications and Media Authority, will lead the review and report back to government by 29 February.
Excluded from the terms of reference was an examination of whether Optus complied with its regulatory obligations, which forms part of the Acma review. The technical cause of the outage and the adequacy of the value of any compensation have also been excluded.
Rowland said there would be wide consultation about the impacts that the outage had, including with the states as well as businesses.
“The recent Optus outage caused significant disruption to the lives of millions of Australians, impacted small businesses, and left many without the ability to contact emergency services,” she said.
“We need to learn the lessons from this serious incident, because no network is immune from technical faults or outages.”
Optus has said the outage was the result of a routine software upgrade which saw changes to routing information from an international peering network. “These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these,” a spokesperson said.
A Senate inquiry on the outage was due to report back to parliament in early December.
Optus’s rivals Telstra and TPG told that inquiry that allowing customers to roam on to other networks during an outage would require significant changes. It could also require large investment to accommodate customers shifting networks all at once.
After giving evidence to the inquiry, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned as Optus chief executive last week, bowing to pressure over the company’s handling of the outage and after a cyber-attack in 2022.
