A fourth fatality has been reported during the failed Optus network upgrade that prevented customers from connecting to 000 in Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
It has also been revealed that Optus became aware of the 000 cut off when a customer contacted Optus directly and told them.
The new death occurred in Western Australia during the outage has been uncovered by Western Australian police who said the deceased had attempted to contact emergency services.
Yesterday Optus CEO Stephen Rue fronted the media in a hastily called press conference and confirmed three people had died during a technical failure that prevented around 600 customers in South Australia, Northern Territory and Western Australia from connecting to emergency services.
Rue says the technical failure during the network upgrade didn’t affect regular calls.
More detailed have emerged about what happened during what should have been a routine Optus network upgrade.
The system upgrade began at 12.30am Thursday and initial testing did not indicate ir has an effect own regular call volume.
There was a technical failure in the system that cut off 600 customers from being able to dial 000.
But there no alarms in the Optus systems to alert the teclo that emergency calls were not connecting.
At 1.30pm – some 13 hours later – a customer contacted the Optus switchboard directly to alert them of the fault.
The South Australian police also made contact with Optus at 1.50pm Thursday and the decision was made to stop the network upgrade and restore the connection to 000.
Optus CEO Stephen Rue has also apologises to state premiers and other ministers for the late notification of the incident that resulted in four deaths.
“I am sorry that the lack of this process led to the late notification of the Premiers and Chief Ministers, and while there was an intention to ensure an earlier awareness of our intention to speak to the media, my team did end up making contact at roughly the same time,” Rue said.
“I also want to reiterate that we take full accountability for the technical failure and that we were unaware of this for a period of time which is an unacceptable gap in time I will ensure is fully investigated.”
This isn’t the first time Optus customers have been disconnected from 000.
The telco was fined $12m by the Australian Communications and Media Authority after a 14-hour full network outage in November 2023 when 2,145 people were unable to call emergency services.
At that time Optus failed to conduct welfare checks on 369 people who were unable to connect through 000.
The investigation is continuing.
