Thirteen-hour outage of Triple Zero service due to Optus firewall upgrade

Optus CEO Stephen Rue stated that a “regular” firewall upgrade at 12.30am on Thursday led to a failure of Triple Zero calls on the network for 13 hours, before the change was rolled back. During a media conference on Saturday afternoon, Rue confirmed an earlier report by the Australian Financial Review, identifying a “firewall misconfiguration” as the root cause of the issue. He explained that the telco’s telemetry did not indicate any abnormalities following the upgrade, although he acknowledged that the monitoring of emergency call carriage is not specifically conducted. Rue noted that initial testing and monitoring did not reveal any issues with call connectivity, and normal call volumes did not raise any red flags. Furthermore, there were no alarms to alert the company that some emergency calls were failing to reach emergency services.

The telco first became aware of the problems just after 9am on Thursday when a customer contacted the Optus call centre. A second customer made a similar report, but inexplicably, neither call was flagged or escalated. Rue mentioned that early reviews suggested the company had not handled these calls as expected, and the information was not escalated appropriately. Optus remained largely unaware of the situation until 1.30pm, when another customer reached out, followed by South Australian Police at 1.50pm, approximately 13 hours after the issues began. Once notified, the company halted the upgrade, restored Triple Zero services, and began confirming the outage with relevant stakeholders. Rue faced intense questioning regarding the delay in public communication about the incident, which only occurred on Friday afternoon, 24 hours later. Federal Communications Minister Anika Wells expressed frustration over the slow and inadequate communication, stating that the gravity of the situation took too long to be conveyed.