\u201cI will be able to say more about these in due course but I do want to be transparent that we now know we were informed by two individuals that they could not connect to triple-zero and this information was not surfaced with the relevant escalation at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rue is due to speak to media again on Sunday afternoon.<\/p>\n
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue.<\/p>\n
\u2018Dreadful, dreadful tragedy\u2019<\/p>\n
The fourth death was linked on Saturday evening, with Optus saying: \u201cWe are saddened to learn of a new fatality in Western Australia which appears to have occurred during the outage period, and we have been advised by WA Police that they believe the individual likely attempted to contact triple zero for assistance.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will continue to work with WA Police and other agencies to understand more of what has occurred.\u201d<\/p>\n
Western Australia Premier Roger Cook said that Western Australia Police were alerted to the case while conducting welfare checks.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am further advised that as a result of WA Police undertaking welfare checks, that there is potentially another case of a Western Australian that has been attempting to call triple-0 and passed away,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are awaiting confirmation of this latest incident.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a dreadful, dreadful tragedy and it\u2019s so disappointing that it has occurred and it is so disappointing about the way that the situation has been revealed, both to Government, to the authorities and to the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
An 8-week-old baby boy from Gawler West, a 68-year-old woman from Queenstown in South Australia and a 74-year old man from Western Australia died after the service went out.<\/p>\n
Rue fronted media on Friday, 29 hours after a customer notified the telco about the fault, confirming people had died during the outage.<\/p>\n
But the press conference was the first time authorities were aware of the deadly outage, prompting leaders across the nation to blast Optus for its handling of the crisis.<\/p>\n
Communications Minister Anika Wells called on regulators at the Australian Communications Media Authority to conduct a credible investigation into what occurred.<\/p>\n
She promised to look at other requirements needed to ensure telcos alerted emergency services to outages.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is clear by the facts that we know at the moment, Optus hasn\u2019t,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe never want to see failures like this happen and we\u2019re disappointed that this happened again.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo triple-0 outage is acceptable and this will be thoroughly investigated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wells said it would have been incredibly distressing for people to call triple-0 in their time of need and not be able to get through.<\/p>\n
\u201cPersonally my thoughts are with those families today.<\/p>\n
\u201cOptus and all telecommunication providers have obligations under Australian law to ensure they enable emergency services calls.<\/p>\n
\u201cOptus have let Australians down when they needed them the most, and this isn\u2019t good enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cDelivering access to triple-0 for when people need it most is a fundamental requirement for a mobile carrier in Australia.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will be closely monitoring these investigations and Optus\u2019 response and we will act in the best interests of Australians to keep failures from this happening again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI will be able to say more about these in due course but I do want to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1443,1135,1558,4381,15166,15974,1138,3011,42,185,7055,1304,43,32147,25347,12860,2552,5885,28050,61,6859,40,38,41,39,32148,17251,8222,6736,5977],"class_list":["post-34300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-about","tag-australian","tag-been","tag-customers","tag-deaths","tag-emergency","tag-firm","tag-four","tag-headlines","tag-is","tag-linked","tag-morning","tag-news","tag-optus","tag-outage","tag-revealed","tag-service","tag-telecom","tag-thursday","tag-to","tag-told","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-triple0","tag-twice","tag-warned","tag-was","tag-which"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34300","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=34300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}