Australia's Largest Telecommunications Company Fined Over Emergency Service Network Disruption

The Australian Communications and media Authority (ACMA) on Wednesday announced a three million Australian dollar ($1.9 million) fine for Telstra for failing to comply with emergency call rules during an outage of Australia's triple zero network in March.

As the national operator of the triple zero service, Telstra is required to meet obligations in relation to the handling and transfer of calls made to the emergency service number, reports Xinhua news agency.

ACMA found 473 breaches of the rules during a March 1 incident in which Telstra's Triple Zero call centre was hampered in transferring calls to emergency services for 90 minutes.

The investigation found that 127 calls during that period were not transferred to emergency services because Telstra neglected to update its backup phone data.

ACMA said the remaining 346 calls were successfully transferred, but Telstra failed to provide the caller's digital location information to emergency service organizations.

"Telstra, as the emergency call provider, is at the centre of this critical public safety service. As such, it must have fail-safe systems and processes in place at all times. In this circumstance, its systems and contingency plans failed people in real need," ACMA member Samantha Yorke said in a statement.

She said that Telstra has been open and apologetic about the outage and has taken steps to prevent a similar incident in the future.

Optus, Australia's second-largest telecommunications provider, was fined 12 million AUD ($7.6 million) in November by ACMA after thousands of customers were unable to call triple zero during an unprecedented outage in November 2023.

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