00:00What we know so far is that WA police have referred the death of a 49-year-old man from
00:07the Perth suburb of Kensington to the coroner to look into whether he died after trying
00:13and failing to contact triple zero on the Optus network last Thursday.
00:18That would bring the number of investigations underway to three, with the death of a 74-year-old
00:25woman also from WA and a 68-year-old woman from Adelaide also under investigation.
00:31As you mentioned off the top, earlier we were reporting that the death of an eight-week-old
00:36boy from the South Australian town of Gorla West was also being investigated.
00:41Police now say that while the boy's grandmother did try and fail to contact triple zero after
00:47he stopped breathing, she later tried again on her mobile phone.
00:52Police say that the boy's tragic death cannot be attributed to any delays in accessing an
00:57ambulance.
00:58But Ruby, we know that 600 people were affected by this outage across three states and police
01:03continue to conduct welfare checks.
01:06But as yet, no more have been considered potentially an adverse outcome of this Optus outage.
01:13And Will, we had the Optus CEO front the media yesterday and on Friday evening.
01:20What is he laying out in these press conferences?
01:22Well, Ruby, we've learnt so far from CEO Stephen Rue that Optus seemed to know about these outages
01:30long before they took action.
01:33So Optus says that they believe the network went down at around 12.30am on Thursday as a result
01:39of a firewall upgrade.
01:41And then around 9am in the morning they received a couple of calls from concerned Optus customers
01:46saying they couldn't reach triple zero.
01:49But it wasn't until about 1.30pm that they were again alerted to the severity of the outage,
01:55including by police.
01:57And that's when the firewall upgrade was ceased and the network came back online.
02:01We also learned that the company didn't begin conducting welfare checks until that evening,
02:06and that's when they were alerted to the potential deaths.
02:09The CEO says that initial investigations by the company show that the warnings that they
02:14received in the morning weren't handled or escalated properly.
02:18Mr Rue has apologised for the outcome itself and also for that delay in their response.
02:25But the company has been widely panned by state and federal politicians who say that it is
02:30completely unacceptable.
02:33New South Wales MP Christy McBain went a step further saying it makes it even worse that
02:38it was only a couple of years ago that Optus had another widespread outage and we had a major
02:43review into the company following that incident.
02:47And yet here we are again.
02:48Here's what she had to say.
02:50Well after the last Optus triple zero outage there was a review undertaken where there were
02:5618 recommendations.
02:58We took on board all of those 18 recommendations.
03:01Optus clearly needs to review its protocols.
03:04No doubt that they'll be employing crisis communications specialists to come in and help them but what
03:10they need to be doing is getting their systems in order so that Australians can have confidence
03:15that when they dial triple zero it's going to get through to one of our emergency operators.
03:19Optus says they have appointed an independent reviewer to look into this incident and the federal
03:25government says it's asked the Australian communications and media authority to also conduct an investigation.
03:31And Ruby it was ACMA who last time Optus had an outage issued them the $12 million fine.
03:37Our transcript on the McKinsey arm will pay a while.
03:40In county, you will see the online contract, knowing the pediatrician fle patch of the barn,
03:42moving to the internet and calling them through 30-1 million dollar fees.
03:46We have passed we have our data on92 or the broker industry with disabilities.
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