Emergency numbers are supposed to be the most dependable digits in a country. In Australia, 000 is drilled into children and etched into collective memory. It is meant to be the last line of defence between crisis and catastrophe. Yet, in mid-September, the line itself buckled.

Shortly after 12:30am on September 18th Optus engineers executed what their boss, Stephen Rue, later described as a “regular firewall upgrade.” Within minutes, 000 calls in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory began to fail. The disruption dragged on until almost 1:50pm, when Optus, under pressure and with police involvement, rolled back the change.

By Optus’s count, “approximately 600 customers were potentially impacted” and, in Mr Rue’s own words, “a proportion of calls did not go through.” Two members of the public flagged problems within hours of the fault emerging. The company has since conceded these warnings “were not escalated appropriately.”

The consequences were grave. At least three deaths—an eight-week-old baby and a 68-year-old woman in South Australia, and a 74-year-old man in Western Australia—are now under coronial review. A fourth case, involving a 49-year-old man in Perth, is also being examined. Whether causation will be formally established is uncertain; coroners are typically cautious in attributing blame. But the optics are damning: families dialled 000 and nothing happened.

It only gets worse from here for Optus. Eventually, the CEO will resign.

A backlash is not just that emergency calls failed, and people died. That's tragic enough. But Optus took far too long to admit how bad the failure was. According to Adelaidenow, Optus did not become aware of the full severity until around 1:30pm—over 13 hours after the firewall upgrade began at 12:30am, and it was only after its CEO was contacted directly by a customer that it acknowledged the problem publicly.

Premier Peter Malinauskas has called Optus’s communication with authorities “reprehensible,” noting that governments were not informed of deaths until after a press conference.

Governments erupted in fury. Federal ministers branded the lapse “completely unacceptable.” The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which only last year fined Optus A$12m for breaches of emergency-call rules during the firm’s November 2023 nationwide blackout, opened yet another investigation.

Mr Rue has struck a contrite note. Optus, he said, has conducted “welfare checks” on affected customers, “referred unresolved cases to police,” and promised to publish the results of its internal review. Yet apologies, however profuse, cannot disguise a pattern. This is the second time in as many years that Optus has left Australians unable to reach emergency services. For a utility entrusted with life-and-death communications, such a record borders on negligence.

Ghosts of failures past

If the episode feels disturbingly familiar, that is because it is. In the 1990s Victoria lived through its own communications debacle. Determined to modernise the Metropolitan Ambulance Service (MAS), the state government outsourced call-taking and dispatch to Intergraph, an American technology firm. The idea was to bring private-sector efficiency to public emergency networks. The outcome was chaos.

From 1995, when Intergraph took control of 000 ambulance calls in Melbourne, complaints mounted: ambulances dispatched to wrong addresses, calls lost in the system, delays measured in hours. Contemporary press reported coronial inquests into at least half a dozen deaths where late arrivals were at issue. In one widely cited case, 26-year-old Stewart Marshall died after a drug overdose; evidence to the coroner suggested he might have lived had paramedics reached him sooner.

By 1999 public disquiet had grown so acute that the newly elected Bracks government established the Metropolitan Ambulance Service Royal Commission, led by Lex Lasry QC. Over nearly two years the commission heard tales of bungled procurement, conflicts of interest, poor governance and, most damningly, families left bereft. Its final report, tabled in November 2001, excoriated both government and contractor. It found that cost-cutting and secrecy had trumped accountability, and that an essential public good had been compromised by haste, opacity and misplaced faith in technology.

The echoes are eerie. Then, as now, officials insisted problems were teething troubles. Then, as now, a private firm reassured the public that systems were robust, even as evidence mounted to the contrary. And then, as now, lives were put at risk by technology designed to safeguard them.

Complexity without resilience

The common thread in both sagas is complexity. Firewalls and routing tables in 2025 are the cousins of the computer-aided dispatch systems of the 1990s: intricate technologies that promise efficiency but are brittle under strain. Most of the time they work. When they fail, the consequences are not mere inconvenience but potential tragedy.

Telecoms executives point out, not unreasonably, that networks are vast, interdependent organisms. Changes are constant; upgrades are routine. But emergency services are not just another workload. They demand redundancy, diversity of routing, and independent monitoring. Regulators in Europe and America increasingly treat them as national-security assets. The European Union now obliges carriers to build resilient backup pathways for emergency calls; American operators must prove “public safety answering points” can survive outages.

Australia has taken steps in that direction. After the 2023 Optus blackout, the federal government accepted the recommendations of the Bean Review, which urged carriers to share outage data in real time and to strengthen central coordination of 000. ACMA’s A$12m fine was meant to sharpen compliance. Yet less than two years later Australians once again found themselves unable to summon an ambulance.

Lessons not learned

Optus insists this time will be different. “Welfare checks” and referrals to police may offer some comfort to bereaved families, but they do little to restore confidence in the network. Politicians, meanwhile, are dusting off the same language heard a generation ago in Victoria: of reviews, inquiries and accountability. Unless regulators act with uncommon resolve, the cycle of scandal and apology will continue.

The Intergraph Royal Commission concluded, in 2001, that outsourcing without oversight was a recipe for disaster. Two decades on, the same principle applies: technology without resilience is an accident waiting to happen. Australians might reasonably ask why, having already buried loved ones in the 1990s due to dispatch failures, they are once again reading headlines about deaths “linked to” a breakdown in emergency communications.

The truth is that telecoms firms still treat emergency services as just another feature set. Until they treat them as sacrosanct, and until regulators impose penalties that sting, history will keep repeating. Mr Rue may be right that the firewall upgrade was “regular.” So, too, were Intergraph’s reassurances, until a Royal Commission made clear they were not. Australians would be forgiven for wondering how many more funerals it will take before the lesson is learned.