An Australian senate inquiry into last year's Optus network crash has called for mandatory public disclosure rules for major outages and the introduction of domestic roaming.
In its report, handed down Friday, the Senate Environment and Communications Committee said it was satisfied Optus took its contingency plans seriously, but did not have confidence that Optus and other operators would be equipped to manage any future outages.

Additionally, and echoing public commentary at the time of the disruption, the committee attacked Optus over its "manifestly inadequate" public communications. "It was many hours into the outage before what little information there was began to reach Optus' 10 million customers across the country," the report said.

Optus' failure "to provide credible, honest and forthright information" also reflected on its inability to improve on its previous communication lapse following a massive customer data breach in 2022, it said.

The committee said the display of poor public communication highlighted the lack of compulsory standards for how carriers should communicate during a service disruption.

'Enforceable standard'

The committee called on regulator ACMA to work with the industry to establish "an enforceable communications standard for carriers that obliges them to communicate to government, emergency services and the public during national outages."

The committee also urged the government to work with operators to allow large-scale network roaming during major outages.

Roaming is not currently available "due to technical, administrative and financial constraints," although temporary disaster roaming is now being tested.

The committee said the need for roaming between the three main operators had become more urgent since the outage. "Australians are currently living in a time where the threat of cyberattacks is pronounced, and livelihoods are more dependent on constant connection than ever before," it said.

The Optus network went down for more than 12 hours in November 2023, cutting mobile, internet and fixed-line services.

The outage impacted around 400,000 small businesses, half of which were unable to accept digital payments, as well as hospitals and ATMs. Around 2,700 calls to emergency services failed to connect.

Optus executives told the committee the crash occurred after a scheduled update from Singtel's StiX caused traffic to be routed through 90 improperly configured Cisco routers, causing them to reach a pre-configured failsafe and shut down.

Lambo Kanagaratnam, the former head of Optus network group, told the inquiry that the scale of the outage was "something that we didn't anticipate."

He told the committee the company had the correct defense mechanism in place, but admitted that "[f]or us to lose 90 routers in one outage is not something that we contemplated."