Optus outage could happen again: expert

Optus’s widespread network outage on Wednesday serves as a jarring reminder of the fragility of many of the modern systems Australian society relies on, according to telecom industry expert Dr Paul Gardner-Stephen.

Optus has blamed a fault in the company’s core network layer — which includes a telecom carrier’s operational and business systems — for the outage, which left Optus’s more than 10 million customers unable to make or receive calls or SMS or access the internet for up to 14 hours.

The failure of a route reflector, a key element of the Border Gateway Protocol system for redirecting traffic, appears to have brought down the entire network. The outage also affected mobile virtual network operators relying on the Optus network, as well as the entire Melbourne Metro train system and businesses across the nation.

Gardner-Stephen, who is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at Flinders University and a Shuttleworth Telecommunications Fellow, said the outage is a timely reminder of how reliant the modern world has become on working telecom systems.

“For example, the inability of folks to pay for services at shops, and thus for those shops to effectively trade. In the past, the workaround was to use cash. But following the COVID pandemic, many people have switched to using non-cash payment methods, whether cards or their digital equivalents on their phones,” he said. “But all those methods rely on the mobile communications networks to function: the EFTPOS machines in most stores are connected via the mobile phone network, for example.”

Gardner-Stephen also warned that Australian telecom networks are vulnerable to the same such outage happening again, due to the way the networks are configured.

“If the mobile network operators configured their networks to ‘fail permissive’ rather than a ‘fail prohibit’ mode for basic telephone calls, SMS messages and mobile internet, then many of these events would have greatly reduced impact, as the typical things that people are trying to do would simply be allowed,” he said.

“This concept of ‘fail permissive’ actually makes sense socially and from a civil liability perspective: you are paying for a service, which is otherwise being interrupted. The carrier should take the very small risk of increased cost for themselves by allowing these services to continue whenever possible, rather than causing massive costs on society — and stress due to inability to contact loved ones etc, including potentially up to unnecessary injury or death due to the inability to access timely medical care, where 000 is not the optimum course of action.”

But operators have no immediate financial incentive to make these configuration changes, Gardner-Stephen noted. Optus is unlikely to face any significant financial penalties for the outage, and mobile operators are not mandated to maintain ‘within cell’ communications during disasters, he said.

As a result of these issues, Gardner-Stephen said Australia should look at every possible means to increase the resilience of the nation’s communications networks and interrelated systems, including potentially new regulations mandating resilience.

To quell the outrage over the outage, Optus is offering customers on eligible plans at least 200 GB of extra data, and customers on eligible prepaid plans unlimited data on weekends for the rest of the year. But it remains to be seen whether this will stem the tide of customers jumping ship to rival providers.

Image credit: iStock.com/Bill Oxford