Emergency Services: Fire, Police, Ambulance, or Tech Support?

[Spotty]

Source: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/dial-1300-bungle-telstra-diverted-customer-support-lines-to-triple-zero-520074?

 

Australian telco Telstra accidentally rerouted phone calls intended for rival ISP TPG's Tech Support 1300 number to the Australian Emergency Call Services line (000). After a service outage affecting TPG networks, TPG customers attempting to contact the company on their 1300 customer support number were instead re-routed to the emergency services IVR (Interactive Voice Response) service and were greeted by an automated service prompting what their emergency was.

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Telstra has admitted it accidentally diverted calls from 1300 and 1800 support lines bound for rival internet service provider TPG to a back-up Triple Zero emergency line last week, leaving business customers stunned and frustrated.
Callers to some 1300 numbers, including TPG’s, once connected, were greeted with the Triple Zero interactive voice response prompt that asks callers to select the emergency service they require.
 

“Telstra has investigated this issue and found that a routing error meant that when some contact centres with 1300 or 1800 numbers were overloaded, the calls were being redirected to the Triple Zero back up/IVR service,” a spokesman for Telstra told iTnews.

“This routing error has now been fixed.”

The Triple Zero failover facility piggybacks the high-capacity 1300 and 1800 numbers as a redundancy feature to allow Telstra to route calls around potential points of failure and bottlenecks. A key reason for the high capacity is that call lines can be flooded in the event of a major incident as potentially thousands of people call Triple Zero at once.

The Emergency Services IVR system is an automated emergency service used when the traditional operator run emergency service is overloaded.

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While highly-trained call centre operators usually answer Triple Zero calls, Telstra maintains an interactive voice response and back-up facility that kicks in if lines become overloaded or there is a major disruption.
A key function of the IVR and back-up is that it can route calls through to relevant Emergency Services Operators (ESOs) as a failover if the main Triple Zero call centre is unavailable.

 

Apparently neither company knew about the issue until IT News contacted them for details about the incident.

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In an incident that has raised questions over the competency and oversight of enterprise telco management between both providers, it has been confirmed the incident only came to light following inquiries by iTnews as to who was responsible for the error.

 

It is Telstra we're talking about, so I'm not really surprised that this happened. Would have been pretty annoying trying to contact your ISP when your internet goes down only to get redirected to the Emergency Services line instead. Thankfully it was redirected to the automated backup service and not the main service with operators, or else it could have put unnecessary strain on the emergency operators and caused delays in responding to actual emergencies.

[rcmaehl]

100% not surprised considering Telstra

[Dabombinable]

[Guest]

to be fair, TPG is cabbage anyway. 

[mynameisjuan]

This can happen if someone decides to fuck around with dial plans on one of their controllers but honestly its hard to affect as many customers as it did. 

[DildorTheDecent]

>Upside down land at it again with the tomfoolery.

[williamcll]

I sure hope emergency services can fix the Australian internet.

[Arika]

Hope Telstra gets fined for that.

[mr moose]

As scary as this is, it's nothing unique to Telstra or any company for that mater.

 

 

[FlappyBoobs]

This is same the reason the UK changed their emergency number to 0118 999 881 999 119 725              3

[TheMightyNoob01]

On 3/5/2019 at 2:49 PM, williamcll said:

I sure hope emergency services can fix the Australian internet.

nothing can fix Australian internet

[leadeater]

No internet, I consider that an emergency.

[Droidbot]

Probably still more helpful than TPG support.

[LAwLz]

On 3/5/2019 at 10:35 AM, mr moose said:

As scary as this is, it's nothing unique to Telstra or any company for that mater.

I can safely say that the company I work for has never rerouted tech support calls destined for a competitor to Sweden's national emergency number. I actually believe that is fairly unique to Telstra.

[Froody129]

Lol @ Australian internet in a country where most other stuff is fairly sorted. I wonder if there will be a fine for this

[mr moose]

10 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I can safely say that the company I work for has never rerouted tech support calls destined for a competitor to Sweden's national emergency number. I actually believe that is fairly unique to Telstra.

What I meant was that the nature of error (even at this magnitude) are not exclusive to Telstra nor happened due to anything exclusively apart of Telstra.

 

People love to insinuate this happened because Telstra are crap, but the reality is people tend to forget the size of Telstra, they manage 43% of all mobile connections (internet and voice), they manage half Australians internet, a good portion of it's backbone and a major part of all analogue telephony networks.    They are managing a mixture and amalgamation of 100 year old technology and modern digital systems.   Mistakes happen all the time in many companies.  yet people are carrying on like Telstra is the only company that has issues and worse than that it happened solely due to a intrinsic part of Telstra. 

 

2 hours ago, Froody129 said:

Lol @ Australian internet in a country where most other stuff is fairly sorted. I wonder if there will be a fine for this

 

The internet is not as bad as people make out.  The issue is everyone loves to dig up the political propaganda surrounding the NBN as some sort of evidence that the whole thing is shit.  As of June last year there were more fibre connections than DSL (which includes vdsl), The single largest (almost half) of internet connections are through mobile networks by consumer choice (they don't want/need a landline).  When you factor for those and look at the issues, it really isn't as bad as the media make out.

 

https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8153.0/

 

 

[danieltien]

Having worked with emergency medical services in the past, it's kind of weird (or troubling) that there wouldn't be any monitoring to see why there would be a change in call volume, or an increase in aborted calls. In the United States, if you call your local PSAP (public service answering point) using 9-1-1 and hang up, you will almost always get a call back to make sure you weren't inadvertently disconnected, still need help, or to get another chance at capturing location data via the E911 system. (Or to chew you or your parents out if you were prank calling). Even if it went to an IVR, public safety systems do monitor call logs--that part doesn't make sense, at least from an American perspective.

[Jito463]

This seems appropriate (35 seconds in if the time stamp doesn't work).

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I figure you got four essential services in our society.  You got your police, your fire, your ambulance, Internet Helpdesk.

- Three Dead Trolls

 

[Andreas Lilja]

On 3/6/2019 at 6:07 PM, danieltien said:

if you call your local PSAP (public service answering point) using 9-1-1 and hang up, you will almost always get a call back to make sure you weren't inadvertently disconnected, still need help, or to get another chance at capturing location data via the E911 system. (Or to chew you or your parents out if you were prank calling). Even if it went to an IVR, public safety systems do monitor call logs--that part doesn't make sense, at least from an American perspective.

Any idea why my phone line dialed 911 on its own once? Apparently it happens often according to the cops that showed up and actually even searched my home.

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, Raskolnikov said:

Any idea why my phone line dialed 911 on its own once? Apparently it happens often according to the cops that showed up and actually even searched my home.

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As many as 50% of emergency calls may be accidental calls.^[10] On many older phones in the United States, pushing and holding down the number '9' key will cause the phone to automatically dial 911.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_dialing

 

Seems like it is common, does your phone have an automatic dialler for 911?