Optus planned upgrade outage disrupts emergency calls, three deaths

Three people have died after a planned network upgrade at Optus disrupted access to Triple Zero emergency calls on Thursday, the telecommunications company said, in an outage that affected hundreds of customers across South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Optus chief executive Stephen Rue told reporters on Friday that about 600 customers were potentially impacted and that welfare checks on affected households identified three deaths. The fault has been fixed and an internal investigation is under way.

Rue said two of the deaths occurred in South Australia and one in Western Australia. He apologised to customers who could not reach emergency services and offered condolences to the families. "What has happened is completely unacceptable," he said, adding that Optus would cooperate fully and transparently with government agencies and regulators while it investigates the incident.

South Australia Police initially confirmed that two people who died included an eight week old boy from Gawler West and a 68 year old woman from Queenstown, and said coronial reports would be prepared. On Sunday the same police force said preliminary investigations had found it was...