Australia:Deaths after hours-long emergency call failure due to firewall upgrade
Australian provider Optus is once again attracting attention due to problems. This time, the failure of the emergency call system is linked to four deaths.
(Image: Nils Versemann/Shutterstock.com)
In Australia, the provider Optus is once again under pressure after a faulty firewall update caused emergency services to be unavailable for hours across large parts of the country, which has been linked to four deaths. The incident occurred last week and affected the states of Western Australia, South Australia, and the Northern Territory, covering more than half the country. Optus CEO Stephen Rue apologized to those affected and explained that investigations had revealed that “established procedures” had not been followed. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the head of the South Australian government said he had never seen such incompetence. Australia's prime minister has suggested that the Optus CEO resign.
Not the first scandal
According to a statement by the Optus CEO, the provider carried out a network upgrade on Thursday, which resulted in the 000 (“Triple Zero”) number reserved for emergency calls partially failing to work. However, this went unnoticed for about half a day, and it was only a tip from a customer who made the seriousness of the situation clear. But then it took a tip from the police to stop the upgrade and restore the emergency call function. An investigation was subsequently conducted into the consequences of the outage. There is now talk of four people who were unable to reach the emergency services and subsequently died—including an eight-week-old boy.
Videos by heise
Optus is Australia's second-largest mobile phone provider and has been in the news several times in recent years for some serious problems. In November 2023, a software upgrade caused a massive interconnection failure, affecting more than ten million people. At that time, too, emergency calls could not be made, numerous payment terminals were not working, and some trains were canceled. A year earlier, a hack had stolen the personal data of over 10 million customers. Optus changed its CEO last November, but Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese now says he would be surprised if Stephen Rue were not considering resigning.
(mho)
