Major Outage Communications

Major Outage Communications

Outage Information & Notifications

Activ8me has a process in place to manage network disruptions, be them major or minor outages, planned maintenance or otherwise.

We aim to minimise the length of any outage and communicate to our customers when their service(s) may be affected by an outage or network disruption.

As a telecommunications carriage service provider, Activ8me is committed to complying with the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024. This governs our response to Major Outages and took effect from 31 December 2024.

For more information on the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024 (the Standard), please visit the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) website.

If you are experiencing service difficulties, please check our Network Updates page for the latest information on current disruptions or planned maintenance in your area.

Activ8me’s Commitments During Outages

Prompt notifications

As soon as possible, we’ll notify you if your service may be affected and where possible, provide details on the outage, including the cause, scale or suspected scale of the outage, estimated timeframe for updates and estimated restoration time (if available).

Ongoing updates

We’ll keep you informed throughout the outage, including any significant, material changes and estimated timeframes for resolution.

Restoration notices

Once your service is restored, you will be notified by email and SMS.

What is a ‘Major’ Outage?

While we’ll work to treat any disruption to your service with the same level of commitment, our obligations under the Standard apply to ‘major outages’.

A ‘major outage’ relates to any unplanned disruption to the supply of our services that results in customers being unable to establish or maintain an internet connection.

A ‘major outage’ must also affect 100,000 operating services or all services that use a telecommunications network in an Australian state or territory.  In addition, a ‘major outage’ must last (or be expected to last) for more than 60 minutes.

What We Do During an Outage

Naturally we aim to minimise downtime for our customers.

However, when a service outage is detected, be it due to our network, our wholesaler’s network (such as nbn) or due to external reasons (like a power outage in the area), we have a process in place to communicate this to affected customers.

Our Network Operations Centre (NOC) monitor services across the country, and when a widescale drop in connections is detected they get to work immediately to determine the extent and cause of the dropouts.  This includes contacting our wholesale providers (eg. nbn) to get as much information on the cause and timeframe of the disruption as possible.

Using the information from NOC and our wholesale providers, we inform our customer services teams of the situation.

Depending on the severity of the disruption, we’ll perform some (or all) of the following actions to inform affected customers, depending on the scale and severity:

(For ‘Major’ Outages, we perform all the following actions)

• Place an alert on our website Service Disruptions Page
• Add an Alert to our IVR (Phone System) informing callers of the outage, including what states or regions and service types are affected
• Add an Alert to Customer’s accounts both in our internal system as well as in the ‘Members Area’ for affected customers
• Email and SMS communications to potentially affected customers
• Post details of the outage on our Facebook page
• Contact relevant authorities, providing them with details of the major outage. These include:
  • The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)
  • The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO)
  • The department of the minister that administers telecommunications (currently, this is the Minister for Communications)
  • For phone service outages, the organisations who operate Emergency Service Numbers (000, 112 and 106).

We then monitor the outage for any updates, contacting relevant service partners for more information and try to determine an ETA on resolution.

If we’re able to ascertain any new information, or a cause for the disruption, we’ll distribute this new information through the above channels.  This includes sending an additional email and SMS to affected customers with these new updates.

For major outages, if the outage is ongoing, after 6 hours we’ll reissue email and SMS communications.  We’ll do this again every 6 hours for the first 24 hours, then once every 24 hours, until the outage is resolved.

For Urgent Assistance

For real-time or urgent assistance, you can contact our Technical Support team on 13 22 88.  Please keep in mind that our Support team is likely to be busy and call times may be longer than normal.

Our Support team is available from 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday, and 8am to 5pm on Weekends (AEDT/AEST – Victorian Time).

Alternatively, you can message us on Facebook.  Please note, our Support team are only available to reply to messages from 8am to 5pm Monday to Friday.

Wholesaler Major Outage Processes

You can find further information on how our major wholesale providers handle outages and see if there is an outage affecting your area below:

nbn®:                    https://www.nbnco.com.au/support/network-status

Opticomm:       https://www.opticomm.com.au/outages/