Optus wears blame but government needs to explain how it handled early advice

For a department carrying the name "communications", Wednesday was not a shining example of clarity in message delivery.

Senators from across the political spectrum were left frustrated and without some answers at a Senate estimates hearing, where the department's most senior officials were grilled over the Optus triple-0 failures.

It takes a lot to unite Liberal senator Jane Hume, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young and independent senator David Pocock. They were as one in their exasperation.

Lack of immediate updates

At every turn during Wednesday's hearing, the department was keen to lay all culpability for the triple-0 outage at the feet of Optus. Three deaths have been linked to this failure. The government does not accept any blame.

The department's fury with Optus, and that of its minister Anika Wells, has been compounded by the lack of immediate updates from the telco about the scale of the outage on the morning of September 18.

It's this failure of Optus to provide "real-time" information that has allowed the government to defend its handling of the crisis, on the grounds it was kept in the dark as much as everyone else.

Wednesday's estimates hearing, however, focused on the shards of light that were available on that day.

Department officials bristle

Optus had sent two emails on September 18. One confirming an outage had occurred, followed seven minutes later by a second saying everything was rectified.

These initial emails incorrectly stated only "10 calls may have been impacted". Only a full 24 hours later did Optus own up to the fact it was more than 600 calls affected, with three lives lost.

Senators were keen to know what happened in response to those initial Optus emails. Even 10 emergency calls failing to get through isn't nothing. Surely someone did something.

It was on this point that departmental officials bristled and the temperature at estimates rose.

The officials revealed the initial Optus emails had gone to the "wrong" address. An old address, it turns out, now being used for a different purpose and only checked every couple of days.

Optus had apparently been told of the changed address and stuffed this up too.

But the fact this piece of information about a changed departmental email address only emerged under questioning, stirred senators' suspicions. When was the email address changed? And when were telcos told? The answers weren't immediately clear.

The inquiries begin

In any event, the minister's office also received these initial emails on September 18 from Optus. And in Question Time, Wells played them down too.

She said these emails incorrectly suggested it was only a "minor outage" with "no adverse impacts on any person". Even though the emails didn't technically say there had been "no adverse impacts", it's true those early emails did not suggest any damage had been done.

It was only the following day that the full scale of the outage became clear.

The blame for what appears to be a series of cascading failures is rightly being directed at Optus.

Multiple inquiries are now examining how exactly the outage occurred, why real-time information wasn't provided, and why initial advice to authorities gave incorrect information suggesting only 10 calls were impacted.

Even if it had provided all the correct information to the right email addresses on the day, this wouldn't have stopped an outage which had already occurred.

But in a complex triple-0 system, the department and regulator need to know at the earliest opportunity what exactly has gone wrong. The government's new Triple Zero Custodian has been given the power to ensure this information is readily accessible.

The government is determined to avoid wearing any blame for Optus's failure but also needs to be transparent about how it handled even dodgy early advice from the telco about the outage as it seeks to maintain trust in the triple-0 system.

David Speers is national political lead and host of Insiders, which airs on ABC TV at 9am on Sunday or on iview.