Telecommunication companies need better safeguards in place to prevent network blackouts, a Senate inquiry has found.

Established in response to the nationwide Optus outage in 2023, the inquiry recommends “an enforceable communications standard” that obliges telcos to better interact with government, emergency services and the public during failures.

As the inquiry heard, it was many hours into the November outage before Optus’ 10 million customers began to receive any notification of a problem.

The 12-hour Optus outage affected mobile and broadband services across the country. During the blackout, hospitals were unable to contact Optus customers, businesses were blocked from EFTPOS, and thousands of people were unable to make emergency calls.

This, said the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, “had immediate and serious consequences for the safety and wellbeing of Australians across the country”.

“People expect to be able to call triple-zero in an emergency,” inquiry chair and Greens spokesperson for telecommunications Sarah Hanson-Young said. “Optus failed millions of Australians and small businesses during the November 8 network outage. Not only did the communications network that many of us rely on fail, but the company itself failed to communicate and keep the public informed through the outage.”

State Emergency Services organisations were similarly impacted by the Optus outage. The inquiry heard SES units were uncontactable or unable to access vital IT services, exemplifying the “broad-ranging consequences of such network failures on the operational activities of an [emergency services organisation] and the safety of the community”.

The senate inquiry – which concluded Friday – requires Optus and other carriers to work towards better network safeguards and “a higher standard of public accountability in the future”.

The inquiry also calls on the Australian Communications Media Authority to review the action undertaken by Optus to strengthen its processes, procedures, and governance controls to prevent such outages occurring again.

In response, Andrew Sheridan – Optus vice-president, regulatory & public affairs – said the telco acknowledges “the importance of having communications processes and protocols that prioritise public safety”. The carrier, he said, remains “focussed on ongoing investment in the resilience of our network” and will continue to cooperate “with the new rules around keeping customers better informed and updated”.

Describing the outage as “a stark reminder of just how fragile and vulnerable telecommunications networks are”, the Senate inquiry tabled seven recommendations to better protect consumers – including the requirement that Australia’s telcos cooperate with one another to deliver large-scale network roaming arrangements in the event of future outages.

“This report raises the bar for all telcos in the future,” Hanson-Young said, “and I will work with my Senate colleagues to implement these recommendations in the public interest.”