Telstra has paid a penalty of more than $3 million over its failure to provide correct details when transferring calls to emergency services.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s investigation into Telstra Limited found 473 breaches over an incident on March 1.
According to ACMA, Telstra’s Triple Zero call centre experienced a technical disruption when transferring calls to emergency services.
For 90 minutes, Telstra went through a contingency process to transfer calls received during the disruption by using backup phone numbers but several of the details on the list were incorrect.
ACMA found 127 calls were not transferred to emergency services.
In its statement today, ACMA said Telstra managed to transfer the remaining 346 calls using the backup phone line but could not provide the caller’s digital location information.
Telstra managed the calls by providing callers’ details to the relevant emergency services.
ACMA consumer lead Samantha Yorke said it was concerning that the breaches occurred after Telstra neglected to update its backup phone data.
“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,” she said.
“In this circumstance its systems and contingency plans failed people in real need.”
Despite this, Ms Yorke said Telstra historically had 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.
“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,” she said.
“These actions go a long way to restoring the community’s trust in this critical service.”
In its statement, ACMA said Telstra had taken action to fix its processes after the incident, including updating its backup phone number list and appointing an independent consultant to review.
