Optus has been savaged for “reprehensible conduct” after the death of an eight-week old baby during a botched network upgrade that prevented people making triple-zero calls.
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas blasted the telco after it admitted up to 600 households in his state, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were impacted by the triple-zero outage on Thursday.
SA police said an eight-week-old boy from the town of Gawler and a 68-year-old woman from the Queenstown suburb of Adelaide died.
Mr Malinauskas lashed Optus for leaving his government in the dark about the deaths before holding its own press conference where it announced them.
“I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation with respect to communication worse than this,” he told reporters late on Friday.
“Quite frankly that is reprehensible conduct.”
He vowed an investigation would be launched to examine the “failure”.
“South Australians expect and deserve to know that when they call 000, help will be there,” the premier said.
Three customers, two in South Australia and one in Western Australia, died after they were unable to call emergency services, Optus chief executive Stephen Rue confirmed.
Federal communications minister Anika Wells said the incident was “incredibly serious and completely unacceptable”.
“The impact of this failure has had tragic consequences and my personal thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one,” she said in a statement.
All telecommunications providers are obligated to ensure they carry emergency service calls and this outage will be thoroughly investigated, she added.
Optus was continuing its “welfare checks” to ascertain any further customer impact, Mr Rue said.
The network technical problem has since been resolved and an internal investigation has been launched.
“I offer my most sincere and heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the people who passed away,” Mr Rue told reporters on Friday evening.
“I am so sorry for your loss.”
He said the duration of the outage was not yet known and further details would be made public once the investigation was completed.
“What has happened is completely unacceptable. We have let you down,” Mr Rue said.
WA police said they were conducting welfare checks.
The federal opposition’s communications spokeswoman Melissa McIntosh expressed deep concern the triple-zero camp-on arrangements that divert calls to other carriers had also failed.
The incident comes almost two years after more than 10 million customers and businesses on Australia’s second largest telecommunications network were left disconnected for more than 16 hours in November 2023.
People weren’t able to call triple-zero on landlines, although it was still possible to do so on a mobile.
The telco was fined more than $12 million for breaching emergency call rules during the nationwide outage.
Optus failed to provide emergency call access to 2145 people and subsequently did not conduct welfare checks on 369 people who tried to call triple-zero, the communications watchdog found.
Mr Rue took over as the company’s chief executive in 2024 from Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who resigned over the 2023 outage.