Telstra strengthens network in wake of Optus outage

In the wake of Optus’s catastrophic nationwide meltdown, bigger rival Telstra says it is stepping up its ­efforts to strengthen the resilience of its network.

Telstra says it is stepping up its ­efforts to strengthen the resilience of its network following Optus’s nationwide meltdown that sparked widespread economic disruption.

“We’re continually taking proactive steps to manage our network resilience with our teams around the country working at it every day,” a Telstra spokesman said on Friday. “We are committed to investing more to improve the coverage, capacity and resiliency of our networks.”

Telstra’s investment is business as usual but the Optus shutdown underscores the ever present threat it faces. Telcos know outages remain a constant risk they have to manage carefully, with phone and internet services as essential to the economy as running water and electricity.

Metro Trains – Melbourne’s public transport operator – uses the Optus network to communicate between train drivers and the control room. Because of the communication blackout on Wednesday morning, trains could not move until a backup system – not reliant on the Optus network – could be brought online.

Meanwhile, many Optus customers couldn’t dial triple-0 on fixed lines, Melbourne hospital operator Northern Health could not take patient phone calls, and CBA’s customer contact centre was shut down. Like falling dominoes, the meltdown rapidly spread across the economy.

Most big companies have several telco providers to mitigate the risk of services being paralysed during an outage. But the extent of Optus’s shutdown was of an unprecedented scale, with its entire mobile, fixed line and internet network collapsing.

Optus is yet to explain to the federal government or the general public the outage’s exact cause.

Chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said a “network event” triggered a “cascading failure”, but she was not able to elaborate further, saying Optus’s engineers were still investigating.

“There’s a misconception out there that the fact we restored the services means that we have all the answers, and that is not the case,” she said. But her response has been roundly criticised.

Crisis communications expert Mark Hawthorne, managing partner of The Civic Partnership, said the cyber attack on Optus last year and Wednesday’s outage were “hardly black swan events”.

“These are entirely foreseeable and Optus should have had its crisis plans in place. A plan for communications to customers, an engagement plan for state and federal government, engagement with regulators, comms for business clients and key stakeholders,” Mr Hawthorne said.

“These are basic plans we have in place for our clients and they are continuously stress-tested. Instead, we have all watched Optus make it up as they go along and it has been a reputational disaster. There hasn’t been a lot of foresight on display.”

Ms Bayer Rosmarin has repeatedly defended her management of the crisis. “Our focus was on restoring services and now our focus is on understanding at the deepest level exactly what happened, in what sequence that allowed a fairly redundant and robust network to not stand up,” she said.

“Like most major global telecommunications networks, our network is designed with multiple layers of fallback and redundancy. And at the heart of this is a modern, intelligent router network that we’ve developed with the world’s leading vendors.”

As for the exact cause, telco industry insiders say it most likely stemmed from a failure in Optus’s border gateway protocol, or BGP.

A similar BGP failure happened in September 2020, shutting down some of Telstra’s internet services for less than three hours.

What makes Optus’s outage more rare and complex is that it shut down its entire network – mobile, fixed line and internet.