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Journey breakdown · Regulation and trust · Optus

The 2023 Optus outage: what customers were told, and when

By BREME · · 5 minute read

In short

On 8 November 2023 more than 10 million Optus customers lost phone and internet access for up to 14 hours. A Senate committee later called Optus's public communication during the outage manifestly inadequate, partly because updates went to social media that affected customers could not reach. ACMA found Optus failed to give Triple Zero access to 2,145 people, and penalties of more than $12 million followed. The lesson is about planning how you reach customers when your usual channels are the thing that has failed.

Who this is for: CX leads, operations managers and executives in telcos, utilities, banks, health services and any organisation whose customers depend on a service that can fail all at once.

What happened, in brief

On 8 November 2023, more than 10 million Optus customers lost phone and internet access for up to 14 hours, according to AAP. Information Age later reported an estimated 10.2 million customers and 400,000 businesses affected, with banks, hospitals and public transport disrupted.

In its Senate submission, Optus said about 90 of its routers isolated themselves after an overload of routing information that followed a software upgrade. Its managing director of networks, Lambo Kanagaratnam, told senators the company did not have a plan in place for an outage of that scale.

Here we walk through the outage as customers lived it: the first hours, the restoration, the aftermath, and the regulatory response. We focus on communication, because that is what the Senate committee examined most closely and what new rules now govern.

Stage one: the first hours, and the channel problem

When a service goes down, the customer's first question is simple: is it me, or is it you? Then: how long, and what should I do in the meantime?

During the Optus outage, the usual ways of answering those questions were themselves affected. The Senate committee found that Optus relied on social media from about 6.30am to 10.40am, even though affected customers had no internet access. The first public interview by then chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was on ABC Radio Sydney at about 10.30am, more than six hours after the outage began.

At a Senate hearing on 17 November, she said communications had been handled by a team of seven people, and acknowledged that there was more the company could have done.

The committee also found that communication with government and essential service organisations was deficient, and that emergency organisations struggled to respond because information arrived too slowly.

Stage two: the people who most needed to get through

The most serious failure was for people trying to call Triple Zero. Optus initially said 228 emergency calls had failed. In January 2024, AAP reported that an Optus review had found at least 2,697 people made unsuccessful Triple Zero calls, more than ten times the original figure. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland called it a deeply concerning development.

In November 2024, ACMA found that Optus failed to give access to Triple Zero for 2,145 people during the outage and did not carry out 369 welfare checks on people who had tried to call. Optus subsidiaries paid penalties of more than $12 million. ACMA chair Nerida O'Loughlin said Triple Zero availability is the most fundamental service telcos must provide, and ACMA found the outage should have been preventable.

An Optus spokesperson said the company knew it had let customers down, particularly those who should have received a welfare check.

Stage three: afterwards, and what customers were offered

Once services returned, the journey moved to recovery. Optus offered 200GB of extra data. Before the Senate, Bayer Rosmarin said there was no precedent for telcos or other essential providers covering consequential losses, and did not commit to specific payments. At that point about 8,500 customers and small businesses had asked for compensation.

Information Age later reported that Optus paid $481,083 in cash compensation to 1,049 consumers, 15 small and medium businesses and 15 enterprise customers. Bayer Rosmarin resigned on 20 November 2023.

Recovery offers are the ending of an outage journey, and endings shape memory. When the offer is the same for everyone regardless of what the outage cost them, many customers will judge it against their own worst moment of the day.

What the Senate and the new rules say good looks like

The Senate Environment and Communications References Committee handed down its final report on 27 September 2024. Its recommendations included a mandatory plan for how telcos communicate with government, emergency services and the public during outages, a fair compensation dispute process through the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, and making compensation a legal requirement.

ACMA then made the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024 on 12 November 2024. It commenced on 31 December 2024 and applies to outages affecting 100,000 or more services for longer than 60 minutes. In summary, it requires providers to:

  • Attempt to notify affected customers directly by app, email or SMS, using the method most likely to reach them given what has failed.
  • Also publish information on their website, through call centres and on social or other media such as radio.
  • Say as much as is known about the scale, likely cause, areas and services affected, when the next update will come and when a fix is expected.
  • Update at least every six hours for the first 24 hours, and sooner if anything material changes.
  • Offer a real-time or near real-time way to get help, such as a phone line or live chat, that is adequately resourced and does not use artificial intelligence.
  • Publish written procedures for communicating during a major outage, and follow them.

The lesson for other organisations

Most organisations write outage messages assuming the customer can still reach them. The Optus case shows why the plan has to start from the opposite assumption: which channels still work when our service does not? For a telco that may be radio and other networks. For a bank or a health service it may be SMS, email or a status page hosted somewhere else.

When we map an incident journey with a team, we put three questions on the wall for each stage. What does the customer need to know right now? Through which channel can they actually receive it? Who in the organisation is responsible for sending it, at what time? If the answer to the last question is a small team working it out on the day, that is the first gap to close.

Then rehearse it. A communication plan that has never been tested against a full outage is a document, not a capability.

Sources

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