Michael Sainsbury

speaker

179 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 11 Jul

Michael Sainsbury’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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7am · Labor’s guilt in the Triple Zero failures · 11 Jul 2026 podcast

So it was just a regular network upgrade and the telco networks, they do thousands of these a week.

So there's all sorts of stuff they're doing every day.

There's obviously thousands of base stations across the country.

They're very sophisticated software systems that connect those things to the fibre optics underground, to the big computers that go out to your phone.

So that's a

They're very complex networks and there's always stuff going on.

This was a regular sort of upgrade that went wrong.

The outage only affected people in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia.

Initially, they thought it affected about 600 calls made to emergency services.

Something in their processes was either bad, could have been a badly written piece of software, or it could just have been a very simple human error where things just weren't followed properly and weren't checked.

If it had been a national thing, again, that may have been picked up more quickly by a system.

But do those systems have enough red flags?

It sounds like they don't.

Well, there is actually a backup across all of the networks in Australia where if for some reason your networks aren't connecting to the triple O system, the calls will be routed into Telstra or Vodafone so they can access that system.

Now the triple O system is actually run by Telstra under contract to the government.

So all the calls go into a call centre at Telstra, which is known as triple O or the emergency call person officially.

What seems to have happened is that the customers on Optus were able to call, make normal calls, but they weren't able to make triple zero calls.

And this wasn't flagged immediately.

There were also people who rang and at least five people, possibly more, rang Optus call centres to tell them that the triple O wasn't working.

And again, there was a failure of process there that that wasn't escalated straight away.

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