The News

Optus’ 000 might have been technical, but the real problem was its carelessness

A failed “routine firewall” upgrade and “process failure” created a 13-hour 000 outage linked to four deaths, Optus said. The embattled telco will publish the results of an investigation into its second 000 outage in two years, this one affecting 624 emergency calls in South Australia, Northern Territory, WA and small pockets of NSW last week (SBS News). Optus said it received at least 5 calls during the outage about 000 not working before acting, with media noting that Optus had offshored its call centre (AFR, $). The regulator, ACMA, and Communications Minister Anika Wells said they weren’t told about the outage until after it happened and also promised a full investigation (ABC News). Despite heavy criticism of the telco, industry and media figures have pushed back against calls for the new CEO Stephen Rue to step down (AFR, $).

The Sizzle: I don’t think Optus’ problem is technical, or that its call centres are offshore. What it sounds like is that Optus was reckless enough not to care enough whether its systems are working. When it comes to computers, we all know that shit breaks sometimes. But getting several complaints in a row and not putting it together? That’s a problem, no matter where the call centre is. Rue also said that “established processes were not followed” which makes me wonder if we’ll find out that routine checks after an upgrade were not done. These all sound like sloppy, unnecessary mistakes. These mistakes cost lives.

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Trump’s visa crackdown is tech suicide

Migrants who do sought-after work — like many in tech — will need to pay at least $150,000 to apply for an American visa under new Trump administration rules (Axios). On Friday, US President Donald Trump signed an order supposedly aimed at encouraging companies to hire American workers by drastically increasing the cost for the H-1B visa, which are primarily used by American tech companies. This was initially said to be the cost each year of the visa, starting from this week (Reuters) but has been walked back to being just a one-time six figure fee for applicants (SBS News). Anyway, this freaked out everyone, leading to companies like Amazon and Microsoft telling H-1B visa holders abroad to jump on a plane ASAP (Business Insider).

The Sizzle: Just about every Western country’s politics is obsessed with “migration” (which is largely actually about race and racism) at the moment. What’s crazy is that all of these countries are super reliant on migration (FT, $). Australia is like America because we have an enormous number of the world’s most productive, enthusiastic workers who are desperate to move here. If Australia was smart, we’d be opening the doors right now to the people fleeing the US because of its war on migration (AFR, $) and science (The Guardian).

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Inside the teen social media ban’s creation

With just over two months until the teen social media ban kicks in, the AFR’s Sam Buckingham-Jones has written a big piece on how the policy came together behind closed doors (AFR, $). Some choice bits in there:

On the logged-out bit, Guardian tech reporter and friend of the Sizzle Josh Taylor had a good piece looking at the insane, extreme, mindrotting slop that you can see on TikTok and Shorts even when logged out.

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Leftovers

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Oh, Also

Spanish football piracy keeps taking the country’s internet offline

Football is a way of life in Spain. But, as accessing sport gets more expensive, people are naturally turning to the High Seas to watch La Liga. In response, La Liga has successfully petitioned Spain’s courts to block “entire IP ranges” suspected of hosting pirate streams, blocking platforms like Twitch and Cloudflare (TorrentFreak).

The only problem? It doesn’t seem to be actually stopping piracy (Reclaim The Net)

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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