Optus could face multi-million dollar fines and legal penalties after a botched network upgrade prevented people from making triple-zero calls and resulted in three deaths, including of an eight-week-old boy.<\/p>\n
The telco has admitted up to 600 households in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were impacted by the triple-zero outage on Thursday.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
At least 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.<\/p>\n
Communications Minister Anika Wells said the incident was “incredibly serious and completely unacceptable”.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
All telecommunications providers are obligated to ensure they carry emergency service calls, and this outage will be thoroughly investigated, she added.<\/p>\n
Optus is continuing its “welfare checks” to ascertain any further customer impact, Rue said.<\/p>\n
The network technical problem has since been resolved and an internal investigation has been launched.<\/p>\n
“I offer my most sincere and heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the people who passed away,” Rue said at a press conference on Friday night.<\/p>\n
“I am so sorry for your loss.”<\/p>\n
He said the duration of the outage was not yet known and further details would be made public when the investigation was completed.<\/p>\n
“What has happened is completely unacceptable. We have let you down,” Rue said.<\/p>\n
WA Police said it was conducting welfare checks.<\/p>\n
Opposition communications spokeswoman Melissa McIntosh expressed deep concern the triple-zero camp-on arrangements that diverted calls to other carriers had also failed.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
People weren’t able to call triple-zero on landline devices, although it was still possible to do so on a mobile phone.<\/p>\n
The telco was fined more than $12 million in penalties for breaching emergency call rules during the nationwide outage.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Rue took over as the company’s chief executive in 2024 from Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who resigned over the 2023 outage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Optus could face multi-million dollar fines and legal penalties after a botched network upgrade prevented people from making…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[85,42,43,145,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-32814","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-top-news","13":"tag-top-stories","14":"tag-topnews","15":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}