The news that three people have died after their triple zero calls failed to connect during the latest Optus outage is the nightmare scenario many of us have long feared. This wasn’t just an inconvenience or a business disruption — this time, the cost was human lives.
When I wrote about the Optus outage in November 2023, I stressed that we cannot afford single points of failure in our telecoms systems. In a follow-up piece in 2024, I pointed to the Bean review’s sensible recommendations: redundancy, roaming, and rigorous triple zero testing. All were designed to prevent precisely this kind of tragedy.
Yet here we are again. Once more, it appears the cause was a human error during a network update. With today’s AI-driven, self-healing networks, such faults should not escalate to system-wide collapse. And the failure of “camping” — the emergency linkage that should allow a handset to switch to another network — highlights years of underinvestment in safeguards.
Where to from here? Apologies and fines are no longer enough. Optus, and the sector as a whole, must treat telecoms infrastructure as national security infrastructure. That means enforced redundancy, mandated roaming, independent oversight of triple zero, and a shift from cost-cutting to resilience. Anything less, and we will see this tragedy repeated.
Paul Budde
See also:
Crowdstrike and what have we learned from last year’s Optus outage?
Optus outage: We can’t afford to have a single point of failure in our telecoms system.