Triple Zero issue: what happened, how we responded, and what’s next

What happened

On the morning of March 1 at 3:30AM to 5:00AM AEDT, an intermittent issue affected some calls and associated data being transferred to emergency service operators. 

The issue was identified and fixed within 90 minutes.

We received 494 Triple Zero calls during that period. As those calls arrived with our agents, there was no Calling Line Identification (CLI) information included. CLI is a telephone network signalling capacity that identifies the calling party’s telephone number, including to Triple Zero.

Without that CLI information to transfer calls to emergency services operators in an automated way, our Triple Zero teams had to manually transfer each call onwards.

Of those 494 calls, 148 were not able to be successfully transferred to the emergency service operators. 

We immediately implemented our back up process, with our teams taking down details which were then sent through manually to emergency services so they could call back those people who had called Triple Zero.

We conducted a restart of the system, and from 5:00AM the Triple Zero service was running stably. We have extra monitoring in place as we investigate this issue fully.

We have been advised that one call that was not able to be immediately transferred involved a person who suffered a cardiac arrest. Sadly, that person subsequently passed away.

We offer our deepest apology to their family, and to anyone who was impacted this morning as they called Triple Zero.  We understand that when someone calls Triple Zero, it is an emergency situation and we take our responsibilities incredibly seriously. Any delay is unacceptable.

Our investigation is underway, and we commit that it will be swift and forensic. It will focus both on what caused the service not to work as intended and the backup processes that are in place with emergency services to see what improvements can be made. 

We will share the findings as we complete that investigation and it is already clear from our preliminary review today that there are improvements that can be made.