Optus failed to immediately respond to at least five calls from customers unable to contact triple zero in the hours before it realised its systems had failed, as the embattled telco confirmed “established processes were not followed”.
The company’s chief executive, Stephen Rue said on Sunday the company had identified at least five calls, routed to an offshore customer call centre, in relation to the emergency line outage that has been linked to at least three deaths.
The revelation comes as pressure mounts on the Albanese government to ensure stiff penalties for Optus over the service outage and the federal minister for emergency management blasted the telco as “absolutely disgraceful”.
A botched firewall update at 12.30am on Thursday blocked hundreds of calls to triple zero in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
A 68-year-old woman died in Adelaide during the fault, along with a 74-year-old man. The death of a 49-year-old Perth man has also now been linked to the outage.
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An eight-week-old boy from Gawler West, north of Adelaide, was also among four deaths authorities had linked to the fault.
While the boy’s family was affected, police now believed the outage is “unlikely to have contributed to the death”.
“The deceased boy’s grandmother has told investigating police that she attempted to call [triple zero] using her mobile phone when she was alerted to the fact her grandson was not breathing,” SA police said in a statement on Sunday. Her call did not connect but she immediately used another mobile phone in the house and was successfully connected to emergency services.
The outage is the second time in two years an Optus network failure has blocked access to critical emergency calls.
Federal minister Kristy McBain said this was the second in “only a couple of years” and “not good enough”.
The minister said the last outage in November 2023 prompted a review that delivered 18 recommendations the government has said it would action.
“Optus clearly needs to review its protocols,” she said. “No doubt that they will be employing crisis communications specialists to come in and help them, but what they need to be doing is getting their systems in order so that Australians can have confidence that when they dial triple zero, it’s going to get through to one of our emergency operators.”
The federal communications minister, Anika Wells, said on Sunday the government had enacted 12 of 18 recommendations from a review of that incident.
Wells said the other recommendations were “under way”. The government had initially said it would enact at least two of those outstanding recommendations by April 2025.
Rue addressed reporters on Sunday and said the company had put in new place compulsory escalation processes where triple-zero outages had been reported.
Optus was unaware of the outage for triple-zero calls until being notified by a customer at about 1.30pm on Thursday, Rue, said.
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The update was cancelled and access to the emergency line was restored after 13 hours.
He said the company had previously discovered two calls that might have provided earlier warning of the outage.
“Our review of our call logs is continuing and so far as part of that process they have found three further calls in relation to this,” he said.
“As we had not detected the triple-zero failures in our network at the time of the calls, there were no red flags for the contact centre.”
Rue said established processes were not followed, but would not elaborate, saying it would be a matter for an independent investigation.
“In the short term I have put in place an immediate halt to future changes to our network system until we have a broader understanding of the events that have occurred,” Rue said.
“The board is in active discussions as to who gets appointed as the independent [reviewer].”
The outage was understood to have impacted people attempting to access emergency services in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Rue also said the company had also discovered two new cases in New South Wales, close to the South Australian border.
Optus has previously confirmed the service failure that blocked emergency calls was the result of a botched firewall update about 12.30am on Thursday. The update was cancelled and access to triple zero restored about 13 hours later, when a customer made direct contact with Optus.
– with Australian Associated Press
