Optus is under immense pressure from politicians across the nation for the way it has handled an outage that led to three deaths, including an eight-week-old baby.
Last night, Optus's chief executive, Stephen Rue, revealed in a snap press conference that three people died after hundreds of triple-zero calls were unable to be made across South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory yesterday.
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas blasted the telco CEO last night, claiming that neither he nor the state's emergency services were given any information about the two deaths in the state.
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"South Australian police didn't know. No one in SAS or ambulance service knew; my office didn't know. But then they conducted a press conference," said Malinauskas.
"I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation in respect to communications worse than this," he added.
Western Australia's Premier, Roger Cook, also spoke out against the telco, deeming the outage "completely unacceptable."
Authorities that run emergency services across South Australia and Western Australia have both said they had no idea about the emergency service breakdown until the telco's impromptu 5.45pm press conference.
In 2023, Optus was fined $12 million for a similar outage that cut 2000 people off from contacting triple-zero.
Following this incident, they vowed it would never happen again.
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Federal communications minister Anika Wells said Optus has "let Australians down when they needed them the most".
"We never want to see failures like this happen and we're disappointed that it's happened again," Wells said.
"No Triple Zero outage is acceptable and this will be thoroughly investigated.
"It would've been incredibly distressing for people to call Triple Zero in their time of need and not be able to get through.
"The impact of this failure has had tragic consequences and personally my thoughts are with those families today.
"Optus and all telecommunications providers have obligations under Australian law to ensure they enable emergency services calls.
"Optus has let Australians down when they needed them the most and this isn't good enough."
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Tech expert Trevor Long described this outage as a "more fundamental failure than the previous one" because, despite having network coverage, people were unable to contact emergency services.
"The Optus network overall was could make calls, take calls, call each other," he told Weekend Today.
"But the triple-zero component of the network didn't work."
The outage was caused by a technical failure in a network update, which brought down emergency calls across South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia.
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