It is now abundantly clear that the Optus Triple Zero outage was not just a technical glitch. Ten separate failures do not happen by accident. What failed at Optus was risk governance — the discipline that is supposed to protect essential services when routine work goes wrong.
This distinction matters, because focusing on firewalls, procedures or individual errors risks missing the deeper lesson. Telecommunications networks are complex, but they are designed to absorb technical failure. When they do not, it is almost always because governance, oversight and escalation mechanisms have failed.
As I have argued on many occasions, telecommunications is now as critical to society as electricity or water. Emergency services, banking, healthcare, government operations and personal safety all depend on it. Yet it is still governed largely as a competitive retail market, rather than as essential national infrastructure. That mismatch is why we keep seeing outages with serious real-world consequences.
There is also a broader structural issue that cannot be ignored. Internationally, the telecommunications industry is under sustained pressure. Margins are shrinking, competition is intense, and a growing share of the economic value generated by digital services is being captured by large global technology companies. These firms sit on top of telecommunications networks, depend entirely on them, yet steadily eat away at the revenue base of traditional telcos.
The imbalance is stark. Today, the combined market capitalisation of the world’s top ten technology companies exceeds the GDP of every nation on Earth except the United States. Yet these companies do not build, maintain or upgrade national telecommunications infrastructure. They monetise it. The result is a structural squeeze: telcos carry the cost, risk and regulatory burden of operating essential networks, while much of the profit flows elsewhere.
This creates a dangerous dynamic for what has effectively become a national essential service. As revenues decline, so does the incentive — and sometimes the capacity — to invest adequately in resilience, redundancy and risk management. Left to market forces alone, under-investment becomes a systemic risk, particularly for emergency communications.
The Optus review confirms that this incident was not caused by a lack of rules or procedures. Processes existed. Controls existed. Alerts existed. What failed was the consistent application of those controls and the alertness to escalate when something was clearly not right. That is the hallmark of a governance failure.
One of the most alarming finding in the review is not about Optus at all, but about the Triple Zero system itself. Some emergency calls can take 40 to 60 seconds to connect — in complete silence. In a real emergency, people do not wait that long. They hang up, try again, or assume the system has failed.
This is a national problem, not just an Optus one. What is extraordinary is that this behaviour has existed for several years without being widely understood or urgently addressed. The shutdown of 3G, increasing device diversity, and the interaction between handset software and network settings have fundamentally altered how emergency calls behave. Regulation and testing regimes have not kept pace with this reality. Close to 100.000 phones might in one way or another no longer be adequate enough to handle all of the service, most importantly including the 000 service.
That is why I remain concerned that we are still relying too heavily on promises of future reform. Telecommunications needs to be treated as an essential service, with enforceable risk controls, not aspirational statements about cultural change. Reform must be structural, measurable and immediate. It becomes increasingly obvious that the government also has to play a major role in ensuring a world-class operation of this national asset.
This means mandatory independent risk sign-off for network changes affecting emergency services. It means enforceable performance standards for emergency call connectivity. It means real-time data sharing with emergency agencies. And it means regulators having both the authority and willingness to intervene when public safety is compromised. We also need to be ensured that sufficient investments are available for the rapidly changing nature of this infrastructure, both geopolitical and technology wise.
Finally, this incident must be seen in context. We have not just this Optus failure, but several major outages across all of Australia’s major telecommunications providers in recent years. The Optus incident should therefore be treated as a warning, not an anomaly.
Unless we start governing telecommunications as the critical infrastructure it has become — in regulation, oversight and economic policy — similar failures are not just possible. They are inevitable.
Paul Budde
Hi David,
Here are a few comments from me.
It is clear that this was not atechnical glitch. Ten separate failures don’t happen by accident. What failed at Optus was risk governance — the discipline that should protect essential services when routine work goes wrong.
As I have been arguing before on many occasions, telecommunications is now as critical as electricity or water, but it’s still governed like a competitive retail market. That mismatch is why we keep seeing outages with real-world consequences.
In relation to the Nokia issue, you can outsource operations, but you can’t outsource responsibility. If contractors and internal teams both miss obvious red flags, that points to a systemic failure of oversight, not human error.
One of the most alarming findings is that some emergency calls can take 40 to 60 seconds to connect — in silence. In a real emergency, people don’t wait that long. That’s a national problem, not just an Optus one. It is amazing that we didn’t know this earlier as this has been going on now for several years.
I am still worried about very strong immediate and structural action. Telecoms needs to be treated as an essential service and needs enforceable risk controls, not promises of cultural change. Reform has to be structural, measurable and immediate.
WE have not just this Optus incident but several similar incidents from all the major players. So the Optus issue should be treated as a warning, not an anomaly. Unless we start governing telecommunications as critical infrastructure, similar failures are inevitable.
Paul