New South Wales revealed to be another state strike by Optus outage

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The Optus triple-zero call failure has affected a fourth state with the company now revealing two callers in New South Wales were also unable to make emergency calls. The outage had initially been linked to the death of a baby boy in South Australia. But police now say it's unlikely to have caused his death. Optus is blaming human error for the outage and has revealed three warnings weren't acted on.

Transcript

00:00Another day, another apology.

00:04This is not clearly good enough.

00:07The Optus CEO again fronting the cameras over Thursday's 13-hour triple zero outage,

00:12which caused hundreds of emergency calls to fail.

00:16Among them, about 20 calls made by a South Australian woman

00:18urgently seeking an ambulance for her mother, who'd had a fall.

00:23So I ran down to the back bedroom where my daughter's asleep

00:25and I woke her up and I said, what carrier are you with?

00:29And she said, Telstra.

00:31So I took her phone and I rang and I was able to get through.

00:34The telcos now revealed five customers contacted offshore call centres

00:38to report the failures, but operators didn't raise the alarm.

00:42There were no red flags for the contact centre to alert them to any live issues.

00:47No doubt that they'll be employing crisis communications specialists

00:51to come in and help them, but what they need to be doing

00:53is getting their systems in order.

00:55Optus says it is.

00:57By now monitoring triple zero volumes around the clock

00:59and ordering call centre staff to escalate any reported failures.

01:04It's also now revealed that two callers in a fourth state, New South Wales,

01:08were also unable to connect to triple zero during the failure,

01:12which it's blaming on human error during a network upgrade.

01:15Early investigations show that it appears that established processes were not followed.

01:21Certainly this does serve to undermine trust in the level of confidence that consumers can have in telcos.

01:29Police in WA were initially told by Optus on Thursday night that 26 triple zero calls in the state had failed

01:36and then on Friday they were informed an additional 123 emergency calls didn't go through.

01:42Sadly, throughout the course of checking on those 149 West Australians,

01:49it was identified that a second person has died.

01:53The outage had also been linked to two deaths in SA,

01:57including an eight-week-old boy who stopped breathing.

02:00Police have now clarified that while the family was impacted by the outage,

02:04it appears unlikely to have contributed to the death.

02:07The boy's grandmother telling police her initial call to triple zero failed,

02:11but she immediately used another phone to get through.

02:14Coroners in both states are now investigating.

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