Things that make you sad.

[heater31]

I'm sorry, Optus, what?

Those affected need to bury Optus in the courts. Absolutely inexcusable to allow this failure of systems to happen

[heater31]

I'm sorry, Optus, what?

Those affected need to bury Optus in the courts. Absolutely inexcusable to allow this failure of systems to happen

Reported that an 8 week old is one of the deaths!!

Disgrace is an understatement

[dedja]

Optus obviously haven’t learned from previous incidents on how to manage, advise and report, so this is a continuation of those major issues.

To not notify anyone when they knew of the issues is right up there.

That said, no system is infallible, and whilst it would have obviously caused great distress to those trying to contact 000 during the outage, calls to other numbers apparently weren’t affected.

Without any knowledge of any of those that tried to call 000, including those who subsequently experienced a tragedy, it would have been an extremely distressing situation to be in. They would have had to try to contact others to raise the alarm, or even go to neighbours (if they had any nearby). Regardless, precious time would have been lost doing so.

Optus have some major systemic issues that need to be rectified, and they appear to be in no hurry to do so.

What should be the response? There are regulatory means to punish them, but they have been down that track before and it so far hasn’t changed the behaviour.

For the victims, yes, they have a legal avenue they can take, but such action is never going to bring anyone back.

All very sad, tragic and unfortunately, avoidable.

[gadj1976]

I don't know if this is possible, but should calling 000 bypass all blocked networks until they reach a network that accepts their call?

[dedja]

I don't know if this is possible, but should calling 000 bypass all blocked networks until they reach a network that accepts their call?

It should be noted that Telstra have also inadvertently blocked 000 calls on their network in the past, but that was an unplanned outage. By the very nature of networks, the carrier will need to cater for unrestricted access to 000 via whatever route it needs to take. To allow this requires appropriate network config, which is always susceptible to inadvertent error if the carrier is negligent, which clearly Optus was in this situation, as they have been previously.