Think the government runs Triple Zero? Wrong. No wonder it’s failing

Ask someone chosen at random if they think Triple Zero is a government service, and they’d almost certainly say they do. Only those who have had reason to think about it would probably know that it’s private, provided by the suite of telecommunication companies we use every day. I note this for two reasons. First, it says much about how thoroughly we’ve handed things over to the private sector. And second, that despite this, we still feel in our bones that some things are so essential that we assume government is in charge.

This brings me to the theatrical lashing of Optus in a Senate inquiry this week into September’s Triple Zero outage. To call this theatre is not to say it doesn’t matter, or yields nothing important. It does. We now have a fuller picture of Optus’ failures, its slowness to communicate those failures to the federal government, and how those failures might have cost lives. The pressure now being heaped on Optus is deserved; the increasingly common calls for the government to terminate Optus’ government contracts, or even its telecommunications licence, are entirely understandable.

Can Australians still trust the three digits they’ve been taught to dial since childhood?Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Rather, I call it theatre because the spectacle focuses attention on a key protagonist as though this is a drama about a villain or bad actor. But precious little in politics actually boils down to that. Failure, incompetence, even negligence typically occurs in a context that makes it likely. And that context – the rules, the systems of accountability, the regulation or lack of it – is where government fails or succeeds. When we ignore that, we get something like how the US Congress frequently drags in tech giant bosses and dresses them down for the world’s cameras for destroying democracy or leading kids to suicide, while never really turning the focus to what allows those same tech giants to keep behaving as they do.

To be clear, Optus’ September failures seem to have occurred at every level and every stage. Its Triple Zero outage occurred when a “routine upgrade” failed, apparently a result of human failure between engineers in Australia and India. Optus failed to detect it because no one took the routine step of manually dialling Triple Zero during the upgrade. As a result, the usual alarms didn’t go off. When customers called Optus to alert the company to the failure, they reached offshore call centres whose staff failed to escalate the issue to their supervisors on five occasions.

So it took about 15 hours for the Optus CEO to hear about it. When Optus alerted the communications minister, it then underreported the number of Triple Zero calls that had failed, and wrongly advised that the issue had been resolved. When Optus learnt that the outage had affected hundreds of calls, during which people had died, it took seven hours to inform the government. This is ironically poor for a communications company.

Optus chief executive Stephen Rue appears before the Senate inquiry on Monday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

But the lesson here isn’t just that Optus’ failure was so comprehensive. It’s that so much can go wrong. In an age of hyper-technology, where our most critical infrastructure is run by software that glitches and deals with unimaginable, ever-increasing amounts of data, we are now reliant on immensely complex systems that are bound to fail periodically. In some ways, we get this. Stories of system blackouts or data breaches in our internet providers or our banks frequently punctuate our news. We’ve all experienced a dodgy software update on our smartphones. And we merrily presume something like Triple Zero will be immune.

But actually, we’ve had fair warning. Optus had a similar Triple Zero outage in 2023, which locked out more than 2000 calls. And crucially, it’s not just Optus. Telstra had a 90-minute Triple Zero outage in March last year affecting hundreds of calls. When our Communications Authority investigated, it found 473 breaches of the rules, the main problem being that “Telstra neglected to update its back-up phone data”. In the end, the authority fined Telstra $3 million.

Lest we think that failure is the exception that proves the rule, Telstra had another outage just over a month ago, this time in Broadwater, Western Australia. And on Thursday, Optus apologised for a disruption to services on Wednesday in which more than a dozen people in Victoria and NSW were unable to connect to Triple Zero. Optus might be the worst offender, but it will never be the only one. Even if the government cuts Optus loose, something like this will surely happen again.

The government knows that. After Optus’ 2023 outage, it commissioned a review of the Triple Zero system, which found this is a hideously complicated system involving the interaction of multiple telcos, all manner of software, human operators and even countless brands of handsets which work differently with the system. It has many potential points of failure. But it doesn’t have someone overseeing all this to ensure it works. That’s why, at the heart of this review – recommendation two – is that the government establish a “Triple Zero custodian”, who will monitor the “end-to-end performance of the ecosystem”.

More than 18 months ago, the government accepted this recommendation. Last month, as the latest Optus disaster became clear, the government suddenly introduced legislation into parliament to establish the custodian. Why did this take so long, and why was it suddenly possible to do it last month? We don’t know. The opposition, meanwhile, is happy to accuse the government of inaction, and happy to skewer Optus, but has less passion for the idea of the custodian itself. Apparently, it’s too reminiscent of regulation for the Coalition to embrace wholeheartedly.

A privatised Triple Zero is asking these companies to invest enormous amounts of money into a network that doesn’t deliver profit. It’s asking them to forego notions like efficiency for the sake of reliability. We can do that – indeed we have little choice – but only once we acknowledge how unnatural a request this is. And at that point we have two options: ratchet up the outrage and the fines to the point telcos would rather lose profit than face, or ask the state to act like one in exactly the way its own review suggests. The first feels satisfying, all smoke and fury. But be careful that smoke doesn’t screen our view of the second.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.

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