Four people have now died following an Optus technical failure. Photo / NewsWire
Australian telecom firm Optus was told twice by customers about an outage to the emergency triple-0 service on Thursday morning, it has been revealed.
It comes as a fourth death has been linked to failed attempts to contact the emergency services, which were down for nearly 14 hours in parts of the country, with an 8-week-old baby among those who died during the outage.
Chief executive Stephen Rue said the planned technical upgrade started at 12.30am on Thursday and was stopped at around 1.50pm (local time) after South Australia Police notified Optus of a problem.
But Rue also said two calls had been made to the Optus contact centre on Thursday morning to inform the company that Triple-0 was not working. These are now the subject of complaints referred to Optus by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.
He said: “Early review suggests that we have not handled these calls as would be expected.
“I will be able to say more about these in due course but I do want to be transparent that we now know we were informed by two individuals that they could not connect to triple-zero and this information was not surfaced with the relevant escalation at the time.”
Rue is due to speak to media again on Sunday afternoon.
The fourth death was linked on Saturday evening, with Optus saying: “We are saddened to learn of a new fatality in Western Australia which appears to have occurred during the outage period, and we have been advised by WA Police that they believe the individual likely attempted to contact triple zero for assistance.
“We will continue to work with WA Police and other agencies to understand more of what has occurred.”
Western Australia Premier Roger Cook said that Western Australia Police were alerted to the case while conducting welfare checks.
“I am further advised that as a result of WA Police undertaking welfare checks, that there is potentially another case of a Western Australian that has been attempting to call triple-0 and passed away,” he said.
“We are awaiting confirmation of this latest incident.
“This is a dreadful, dreadful tragedy and it’s so disappointing that it has occurred and it is so disappointing about the way that the situation has been revealed, both to Government, to the authorities and to the public.”
An 8-week-old baby boy from Gawler West, a 68-year-old woman from Queenstown in South Australia and a 74-year old man from Western Australia died after the service went out.
Rue fronted media on Friday, 29 hours after a customer notified the telco about the fault, confirming people had died during the outage.
But the press conference was the first time authorities were aware of the deadly outage, prompting leaders across the nation to blast Optus for its handling of the crisis.
Communications Minister Anika Wells called on regulators at the Australian Communications Media Authority to conduct a credible investigation into what occurred.
She promised to look at other requirements needed to ensure telcos alerted emergency services to outages.
“It is clear by the facts that we know at the moment, Optus hasn’t,” she said.
“We never want to see failures like this happen and we’re disappointed that this happened again.
“No triple-0 outage is acceptable and this will be thoroughly investigated.”
Wells said it would have been incredibly distressing for people to call triple-0 in their time of need and not be able to get through.
“Personally my thoughts are with those families today.
“Optus and all telecommunication providers have obligations under Australian law to ensure they enable emergency services calls.
“Optus have let Australians down when they needed them the most, and this isn’t good enough.
“Delivering access to triple-0 for when people need it most is a fundamental requirement for a mobile carrier in Australia.
“We will be closely monitoring these investigations and Optus’ response and we will act in the best interests of Australians to keep failures from this happening again.”
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