Technology is now a pervasive part of our everyday lives. We take for granted that it will work, even if we don’t quite understand how it works. And we expect it to work perfectly – until it doesn’t.

Usually, a failure of technology is annoying and frustrating. But occasionally – thankfully rarely – it’s a matter of life or death.

Last week, people died while trying to call Triple Zero for help, with their calls unanswered because their carrier’s network was down after Optus botched what was supposed to be a routine firewall upgrade of its network. What Optus has described as a “technical failure” meant that callers to emergency services in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia were unable to get through.

Pressure is mounting on Optus CEO Stephen Rue after the disastrous outage.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

There seem to be several layers of mistakes that led to the prolonged outage.

Those implementing the firewall upgrade apparently hadn’t followed protocols. When customers tried to alert the company that there was a problem, offshore-based call centre staff didn’t escalate the issue to their supervisors. Instead, they tried to troubleshoot the problem, which meant they didn’t generate the red flags in Optus’ systems that would have alerted more senior staff to an outage.

These are human errors layered over what seems to have been a software glitch in the upgrade; errors that vastly magnified the consequences of the faulty upgrade.

The government and community may be asking more of major companies than they, or the available technology, can deliver.

Network outages aren’t uncommon in companies such as telcos or banks, which are essentially massive – and massively complex – technology platforms being asked to cope with vast amounts........

© Brisbane Times