Three individuals have lost their lives due to an Optus network upgrade failure, the telco has noted, over 24 hours after it happened.
At the end of a workday on a Friday in the lead-up to a weekend, Optus delivered some somber and heartbreaking news: three Australians lost their lives on Thursday as network maintenance took out emergency call capabilities, impacting Triple Zero calls in parts of the country.
As a result, failed emergency calls were recorded in the Northern Territory, South Australia, and Western Australia. Worse, three of the households saw someone tragically pass away when they couldn’t get in contact with Triple Zero, including an eight-week old child.
The story is heartbreaking, and is another problem for Optus which saw its network go down in November 2023, affecting millions of customers around the country and taking down the ability to connect to emergency services, as well as everything else.
In this instance, the technical failure has been rectified and Optus investigating it fully, but the results are as catastrophic as they get, with life lost from Optus’ failure.
What could have Optus done to minimise problems?
Mobile networks clearly need maintenance and work to keep them afloat, and Optus isn’t alone in losing lives to the problem of network maintenance. Case in point, back in early 2024, a Telstra outage meant a lack of emergency services and consequently the death of a Victorian, something the telco noted the same day it happened.
By comparison, Optus’ failure occurred on September 18, with the conference called about the situation the day after, September 19, and at the end of the day. That’s not an ideal approach to managing a clear disaster, particularly when lives have been lost.
But Optus could have warned customers all the same, both before the network maintenance and during.
For instance, an alert SMS could have gone out advising nearby customers of a potential disruption, so they wouldn’t have been caught staring at their phones. If too onerous, a simple text could have been sent to affected customers in regions that calls to services may be affected, and to seek other means of communication at that time.
Much like an emergency broadcast by police, a text could have easily been sent to anyone affected by the tower failure, before or during.
That text could have noted that users of newer phones might be able to bypass the towers by using emergency satellite texts, a service Apple launched on the iPhone 14 in Australia, but which also works on all iPhones since, and even a few Androids on Telstra, as well,
The simple reality is that Optus could have simply done something to warn customers of failure, with possible steps on what to do next in an emergency.
Simply leaving it to happen, to change, and to wait to apply potential fixes could have had catastrophic consequences, and clearly did.
You have to wonder whether subscribers to other telcos were affected given the way emergency calls send to the nearest tower. In some instances, it is entirely possible that customers of other networks might have been unable to get through.
We won’t know what caused the Optus technical failure for a few days, but the result is clear, and it’s not good.
And this should clearly go beyond investigation, because while knowing what problems occurred is critical, ensure this doesn’t keep happening during updates, as well as what can be done to mitigate disaster is equally important.
