Optus and its subsidiaries had been penalised $12 million for Triple Zero title failures all through its essential outage a 12 months previously, along with for not performing welfare checks.
The penalty was imposed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) following an investigation.
Optus admitted to the scale of the problems in January this 12 months and apologised.
ACMA acknowledged the penalties had been for 2145 people whose emergency calls failed via the outage, and for the telco not conducting welfare checks on 369 people
Its chair Nerida O’Loughlin acknowledged the dimensions of the penalty “reflected the critical nature of the breaches”.
“Triple Zero availability is the most fundamental service telcos must provide to the public,” O’Loughlin acknowledged.
“Our findings [pdf] indicate that Optus failed in the management of its network in a number of areas and that the outage should have been preventable.”
ACMA contends that Optus should have configured its core routers to have the flexibility to cope with the sudden improve in routing information they obtained that day from an upstream provide, and by no means relied on the routers’ default settings.
It moreover argued Optus had insufficient out-of-band (OOB) group capabilities it could use for diagnostic and administrative capabilities inside the event of an outage.
ACMA well-known that “totally different failings by Optus via the outage had been acknowledged in a post-incident analysis that the federal authorities commissioned.
“Beyond the penalties announced today by the ACMA, the Optus outage has directly led to changes for industry regulatory obligations in relation to emergency call services,” O’Loughlin acknowledged.
