Major Outage Policy

1.Introduction

This policy explains how we will comply with our obligations in the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024 to communicate with the public, other carriers, carriage service providers and relevant stakeholders during a major outage to a telecommunications network.

2.What is a major outage?

A major outage is any unplanned adverse impact to a telecommunications network used to supply carriage services to end-users that :

results in in end-users being unable to establish and maintain a carriage service; and
affects (or is likely to affect) 100,000 or more services, or all carriage services using the telecommunications network in a State or Territory; and
is expected to be, or is, of a duration longer than 60 minutes.

3.How we will communicate about a major outage.

As soon as practicable after detecting or receiving notification of a major outage, we will:

notify each carrier (‘second carrier’) or carriage service provider with whom we have a commercial arrangement for the supply of carriage services if end-users of the second carrier or carriage service provider are affected by the major outage;
communicate information (in an easily accessible form) about the major outage to the public using our website and our primary social media account and/or at least one other type of media.

As soon as practicable after detecting a major outage on our network, we will communicate with the emergency call person for 000, 112 and 106; the ACMA; the Department of Communications; and the TIO about the major outage.

Using the information available to us at the time and subject to our obligation to protect telecommunications network security and national security, our communications and notifications will include details about the scale or suspected scale of the major outage; its likely cause; the geographic areas and types of services affected or likely to be affected; and the estimated timeframes for updates and rectification of the major outage.

We will update our communications and notifications:

If there is a material change to the major outage or otherwise at least every six hours for the first 24-hours of the major outage and at least once during each subsequent 24-hour period.
As soon as practicable after all services affected by the major outage have been restored.

4.Major outage during natural disasters

If the major outage is caused by a natural disaster, we may not be able to provide the communications and notifications set out above, however, in such circumstances if the major outage affects our network, at a minimum we will publish the information about the major outage referred to above on our website.