00:00 Telstra has been forced to apologise to people in several states after people dialing 000
00:07 couldn't actually get through to the 000 operators. For about more than an hour this morning,
00:13 those outages were happening between about 3.30 and 5 o'clock. Now, what actually happened,
00:19 Telstra says, was a technical problem. So, Telstra operators answered the call, but they
00:23 couldn't actually then transfer the people with emergencies to emergency services. Instead,
00:29 they initiated what they say was their backup plan and had to manually email the contact
00:34 details of these people to fire, police and ambulance services. And that happened to around
00:40 150 people. Now, this was happening across several states. However, it sounds like Victoria
00:46 was impacted the worst. Our ambulance union here said it was absolute chaos when all of
00:51 this was happening in the early hours of this morning. And there was actually around 400
00:56 calls for help during that time. Now, in one case, paramedics here in Melbourne were delayed
01:03 in arriving to a person who was suffering from a cardiac arrest. Sadly, that person
01:08 couldn't be revived and passed away. Now, Telstra CEO Vicky Brady has apologised to
01:14 that family and says investigations are underway, but delays are unacceptable.
01:20 Can I just first offer my deepest apology to the family of that person and in fact to
01:27 anyone who was impacted in those 90 minutes in the early hours of this morning as they
01:34 called triple zero. Vicky Brady says that a preliminary review
01:37 has already found that there are improvements can be made to that backup system and that's
01:42 the system of manually emailing those details through. Now, investigation is underway by
01:48 Telstra. It says it will be forensic and thorough and it will focus on what actually caused
01:54 this service to fail and also have a look at that backup system. And Vicky Brady says
01:59 those findings will be made public.
02:01 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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