Labor’s guilt in the Triple Zero failures
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Daniel James and you're listening to 7am. Another major Talco outage has raised the question. What happens when you call 000 and the call doesn't get through? This week, Telstra blamed a software defect for a national outage that disrupted phones, payments and transport and left more than 300 000 calls failing or unable to connect. The communications watchdog is now investigating, but this isn't the first time Australia has been here. Last year, Optus had its own catastrophic failure after a 13-hour outage blocked hundreds of emergency calls across South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and was linked to deaths. ACMA opened an investigation into Optus, but still hasn't published final findings.
So today, we're bringing you Ruby Jones's conversation from last year with journalist and Crikey contributor Michael Sainsbury on what went wrong at Optus and how the government's choices led us here. It's Sunday, July 12. This episode was originally published in September 2025.
So, Michael, last week, hundreds of Australians discovered that they couldn't get through when they tried to call triple zero with catastrophic and we now know some fatal consequences. So tell me about what we know about what was happening with Optus' network while this was going on.
What happened during the recent Telstra and Optus triple-zero outages and how many emergency calls failed?
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.
Today, it was revealed the deadly outage, the result of a botched firewall upgrade that lasted 13 hours. 600 customers across three states without access to triple zero.
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.
Good evening. We have a major story developing as we go to air. Just moments ago, we learned that three people have died during a major Optus network outage that affected triple zero calls.
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.
Okay. And I mean, you can see how these things might happen, but you would assume that in the case of human error or, you know, a bad update, that there would be a backup. Something would kick in if a network, you know, isn't working like this, particularly when it comes to triple zero calls. So what should have happened?
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.
Customers tried five times to warn the company that emergency calls were not going through. In the past few hours, Optus has confirmed those complaints were received by its offshore call centre.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:34
2
What happened during the recent Telstra and Optus triple-zero outages and how many emergency calls failed?
1:34–8:59
3
How did the network upgrade and firewall change trigger the Optus 13-hour outage?
8:59–14:15
4
How many deaths and real-world consequences were linked to the Optus triple-zero failure?
14:15–16:20
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from 7am
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