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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