An Optus customer has detailed the distressing moment she could not reach emergency services when her mother became trapped under her mobility scooter during the company’s 13-hour outage.
Hundreds of calls to emergency services failed during the incident on Thursday in SA, WA, the Northern Territory and far west of New South Wales.
On Friday, Optus said three deaths were linked to the incident, including a 68-year-old woman in the Adelaide suburb of Queenstown, before another death in WA was revealed on Saturday.
On Sunday, SA Police said preliminary investigations indicated that one of those deaths — an eight-week-old baby in South Australia — was “unlikely” to have been caused by the Optus triple-0 failure.
Optus has been slammed by South Australians affected by Thursday’s outage that left hundreds unable to contact emergency services. (AAP: Dan Peled)
Adelaide resident Kirsty McPherson, who is also a former triple-0 operator, told ABC Radio Adelaide on Monday that she called emergency services after her mother had a fall at home.
“I was at work and got a notification she’d had a fall, so what happens is it dials me directly and all I could hear was her screaming,” she said.
“She’d had a fall and the [mobility] scooter had actually fallen on top of her.
“I couldn’t actually get any response from her.”
Ms McPherson said she tried to call triple-0 twice on her mobile phone, which is with Optus, and when she could not get through, she thought her phone was “glitching”.
“There was nothing, it just said call failed on my screen and beeped,” she said.
Ms McPherson said she then tried the landline at her workplace and was able to get through to emergency services who swiftly attended to her mother.
She said her main priority was getting her mother help, so she “did not think anything about it” until she got a call from Optus.
“The next day, probably 24 hours later, I received a call from an 02 number, and I don’t normally answer those sort of calls and it was a guy from Optus,” Ms McPherson said.
“He said … ‘just following up on the emergency services call you made yesterday, do you still require emergency service?’.”
She said the caller said “good” before hanging up.
“The poor guy sounded so stressed,” she said.
Premier Malinauskas told ABC Radio Adelaide on Thursday that Optus was initially only providing suburbs, and not specific addresses, to emergency services. (ABC News)
Ms McPherson did not know the reason for the call until she got home on Friday night and saw coverage of the outage on the news.
She said the incident had caused her mother to “lose faith” in the system, and that her family was now in the process of changing phone providers.
“She wants to go into a nursing home now because she doesn’t have faith because we’re both with Optus,” Ms McPherson said.
“She doesn’t have faith she’ll get help in a timely manner.”
Ms McPherson said it was her understanding, from her time working in the triple-0 call centre, that a caller could connect with triple-0 in almost any circumstance.
“I had faith and confidence in that you would be able to connect at any time,” she said.Premier says Optus left state government in the dark
Premier Peter Malinauskas told ABC Adelaide Radio on Monday that the state government was only alerted to the incident when SA Police got in contact because the telecommunications service was not providing it with specific addresses on who had attempted to call.
“This having transpired on Friday night, quickly SAPOL and SAAS tried to get their head around where these deaths had occurred and what the circumstances were. They had jobs to do,” he said.
Mr Malinauskas then called Optus CEO Stephen Rue to intervene.
Another South Australian resident, Chris Tyndall, couldn’t get through to triple-0 when he called following concerns with what he said was a “bad dose” of the flu.
“I rang triple-0 and there wasn’t even a ring tone,” he told ABC Radio.
Mr Tyndall eventually reached emergency services but said he hasn’t heard anything from Optus since the incident.
“I’ve heard nothing from Optus at all, I heard from police the following day,” he said.
“It’s unacceptable.
“As soon as my contract is over, I’m out.”
Outage highlights wider issue in the regions
Broken Hill Mayor Tom Kennedy said on Monday morning that he was disappointed to hear two triple-0 callers in the region were unable to access help as a result of the Optus outage on Thursday.
“We have a city of 20,000 people,” he said.
“To be not having access to an emergency number should make everyone worried and it’s up to the government to make sure that people do have confidence in all carriers to be able to provide emergency access when needed.”
Mr Kennedy said Thursday’s outage spoke to wider connectivity issues in the area.
“You go a little bit out of town, the Optus network doesn’t work as well as other networks, so it’s important that that emergency number is always accessible by those that use that carrier,” he said.
New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park confirmed the two outback callers did not require emergency attention.
The Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA) has started an investigation into the outage.
ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said her agency was not notified of the outage until after it was resolved, which is not the usual process.
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