The death of an eight-week-old boy north of Adelaide on Thursday is “unlikely” to have been caused by the Optus triple-0 failure, South Australian police have said.
The baby is among four people in WA and SA — including a 68-year-old woman in the Adelaide suburb of Queenstown — whose deaths were linked to the Optus outage, which caused hundreds of emergency calls to fail.
SA Police said the investigation into the Queenstown woman’s death was “complex” and that they were “continuing to determine the impact” of the outage.
But police said preliminary investigations had found that while the Gawler West boy’s family was also impacted by the outage, his death was “not due to any delay” in ambulances reaching the home.
“The deceased boy’s grandmother has told investigating police that she attempted to call triple-0 using her mobile phone when she was alerted to the fact her grandson was not breathing,” police said in a statement.
“When her call was not connected, she immediately used another mobile telephone in the house and was successfully connected to triple-0.”
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The outcome of a full police investigation into the death will be provided to the state coroner, who will determine whether it is, in turn, the subject of an inquest, police said.
SA Premier Peter Malinauskas said authorities were committed to providing “appropriate levels of mental health support for that family — not because of the death relating to Optus, but because that’s the right thing to do when such a tragedy occurs in any family”.
In a statement, the Gawler council said it was “heartbroken to learn of this child’s tragic passing”.
“We offer our deepest and most sincere condolences to the child’s family during this period of immense grief,” acting mayor Nathan Shanks said.
Police said while they would not normally comment on individual circumstances, “the public interest in the matter requires this action”.
Yesterday, police said they had conducted welfare checks on 154 Optus customers who were affected by the network failure in the state, and that no further adverse outcomes had been reported.
But Mr Malinauskas stopped short of ruling out further cases coming to light.
“We’re very cautious of accepting everything that Optus says up until this point, and there is still more work to be done in terms of our analysis of their conduct,” he said this morning.
The SA premier said there were many unanswered questions about the outage. (ABC News: Christopher Gillette)
Optus revealed on Saturday that a customer alerted the company to the triple-0 failure as early as 9am on Thursday — hours before the problem was fixed, and well over a day before the company held a media conference disclosing key details.
Mr Malinauskas said governments had been “blindsided” by that media conference, and that Optus’s communication had “been found wanting”.
“Given that we now know they were aware of problems as early as 9 o’clock in the morning, that raises very serious questions about the way they communicated with appropriate authorities,” he said.
“There is an obligation upon Optus to actively disclose to appropriate authorities in government when they’re aware of technical failures relating to their triple-0 system, and we didn’t hear that information.
“Technically, that needs to be examined thoroughly, and we’re in active discussions with the federal government.”
Optus is expected to hold a media conference this afternoon.