Telstra fined $3 million for March's Triple Zero outage

An Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) investigation has resulted in Telstra paying a penalty of more than $3 million for failing to comply with emergency call rules during a technical disruption at its Triple Zero emergency call centre earlier this year. The cause of the disruption has only recently been revealed, in a post from Telstra’s CEO and Managing Director, Vicki Brady, published on 25 November.

The post explains that, at 3.30 am AEDT on 1 March, there was a high volume of registration requests to the platform that manages calling line identification (CLI) — which includes the location and phone number of the person calling — for Telstra’s Triple Zero service. This coincided with other system activity and ultimately triggered a software fault, which caused the CLI platform to become unresponsive.

Telstra, as Emergency Call Person, receives all calls to Triple Zero and transfers them to the appropriate state or territory emergency service — but when calls arrived during this period, there was no CLI information included. This information is needed for each call to be automatically transferred to the relevant emergency services operator; without it, Telstra’s Triple Zero teams had to manually transfer each call onwards. The disruption finally ended at 5 am, following a restart of the impacted server.

Telstra’s contingency process involved asking callers for their location and then manually connecting them to the relevant emergency service using a list of phone numbers stored in a backup database. However, several of the phone numbers for emergency services stored in this database were incorrect, which resulted in 127 calls not being transferred. Telstra instead provided the callers’ details to those services via email, but even this proved problematic after the email address for Triple Zero Victoria was incorrectly entered into the system. For those calls that were successfully transferred via the backup phone list, CLI information remained unavailable.

As Australia’s national operator of the Triple Zero service, Telstra is required to comply with obligations set out in the Telecommunications (Emergency Call Service) Determination 2019, which imposes requirements in relation to the handling and transfer of calls made to emergency service numbers. The ACMA investigation uncovered 473 breaches of the rules relating to this incident.

“Telstra, as the emergency call provider, is at the centre of this critical public safety service,” said ACMA member and consumer lead Samantha Yorke. “As such, it must have failsafe systems and processes in place at all times. In this circumstance, its systems and contingency plans failed people in real need.”

Yorke said it was concerning that the breaches occurred because Telstra neglected to update its backup phone data, although she acknowledged that the company otherwise has a strong record of compliance in its role as the national Triple Zero operator and made considerable efforts to keep the public informed during the outage. The ACMA has also noted the action Telstra has taken to rectify its processes following the incident, including updating its backup phone number list and appointing an independent consultant to conduct an incident review.

“Telstra has been open and apologetic about the outage, communicated effectively to the public and took a variety of immediate actions when problems were identified,” Yorke said. “These actions go a long way to restoring the community’s trust in this critical service.”

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