The federal government says an independent investigation will be conducted into Optus’s Thursday network failure that has been linked to three deaths, with the communications minister saying the telco has “let Australians down when they needed them the most”.
Optus today came under fire from South Australia’s premier, who accused the telco of not promptly disclosing to police key details about the people whose deaths were linked to an outage that sparked triple-0 call failures.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said she was “staggered” by the way Optus had handled the situation, and that she had spoken to the head of the Australian Communications and Media Authority to ensure a “full and thorough independent investigation”.
“The impact of this failure has had tragic consequences and personally, my thoughts are with those families today,” Ms Wells said.
“Optus and all telecommunications providers have obligations under Australian law to ensure that they enable emergency services’ calls.Â
“Optus have let Australians down when they needed them the most and this isn’t good enough.”
On Friday night, SA Police said it had since identified the two deaths in the state, including that of an eight-week-old baby, that were acknowledged by Optus.
The third death linked to the incident occurred in Western Australia.
What we know about the Optus outage
Premier Peter Malinauskas said it beggared belief that Optus did not start sharing information about the deaths until he called the company’s CEO, after the company held a media conference on Friday.
“The lack of information flow from Optus to the South Australian government’s appropriate authorities is somewhat bewildering and it raises a lot of questions,” he said.
“Following the press conference, our emergency services authorities were seeking to get the details around where those deaths were, who those deaths were, and respond to them as appropriate.
“Optus informed South Australian police the names of the suburbs where those two deaths had occurred but did not tell South Australian police the names, addresses and the phone numbers regarding those two deaths.
“The fact that that [information flow] didn’t occur until after a press conference yesterday beggars belief.”
On Friday, Optus revealed three people had died after an outage on Thursday caused hundreds of emergency calls to fail in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia during a network upgrade.
The incident was made public during a media conference on Friday, with Optus blaming a technical fault.
Optus CEO Stephen Rue has apologised for the outage. (Reuters: Hollie Adams)
SA Police said it had subsequently identified the two to die in SA as an eight-week-old boy from Gawler West, and a 68-year-old woman from the Adelaide suburb of Queenstown.
“At this point in time we are not in a position to be able to provide any comment on the relationship between the Optus triple-0 call failure and the precise circumstances regarding those two deaths,” Mr Malinauskas said.
But the premier said he had spoken Ms Wells about Optus’s failure “to be able to ensure the sovereignty and stability of the triple zero service”.
“The initial indication we got from Optus was that the outage was for approximately for two hours. We now know that the outage was over 10 hours and that’s information we have received from Optus,” Mr Malinauskas said.
Mr Malinauskas said the impact of the outage was ongoing.
“As of late yesterday evening there were approximately 150 taskings within South Australian Police where they wanted to do welfare checks where Optus had been unable to get in contact with people themselves.
“South Australian police have been conducting that work throughout the course of the evening, and I spoke to the Police Commissioner this morning and lots of that work is now completed.
“But there are a few still a few more checks that are outstanding and South Australian police can respond to that.”
Asked whether he believed Optus had further information it had not yet passed on, Mr Malinauskas said “that would be unforgivable”, but that there were “very live questions for the way Optus has conducted themselves”.