Pressure is mounting on the Albanese government to ensure stiff penalties for Optus over the service outage that has now been linked to at least four deaths, as the federal minister for emergency management blasted the telco as “absolutely disgraceful”.
A botched firewall update at 12.30am on Thursday blocked hundreds of calls to triple zero in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
An eight-week-old boy and a 68-year-old woman died in Adelaide during the fault, along with a 74-year-old man. The death of a 49-year-old Perth man has also now been linked to the outage.
Speaking to the ABC on Sunday morning, Kristy McBain said this was the second in “only a couple of years” and “not good enough”.
“The fact that no state or federal government was advised of this outage I think is beyond reprehensible,” McBain said.
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The minister said the last outage in November of 2023 prompted a review that delivered 18 recommendations the government has said it would action.
“Optus clearly needs to review its protocols,” she said. “No doubt that they will be employing crisis communications specialists to come in and help them, but what they need to be doing is getting their systems in order so that Australians can have confidence that when they dial triple-0, it’s going to get through to one of our emergency operators.”
Optus was unaware of the outage for triple-zero calls until being notified by a customer about 1.30pm Thursday, Optus chief executive, Stephen Rue, said.
The update was cancelled and access to the emergency line was restored after 13 hours.
Rue admitted Optus had been contacted by the telecommunications industry ombudsman about two complaints from people trying to inform the company about the outage.
“Early review suggests that we had not handled these calls as would be expected,” he told reporters in Sydney.
“Optus will be appointing an independent person to lead a review into this entire incident from every aspect, I hope to confirm that person in coming days.”
Rue pledged to give daily updates as more information about the grave incident came to light and said Optus accepted full responsibility for the problem.
The Nationals leader, David Littleproud, also joined the government in condemning Optus over the outage, describing the failure by the company as “abhorrent behaviour”.
“They have a responsibility,” Littleproud said. “This is a universal service and a universal right for Australians to be able to use in our hour of need.
“The fact that Optus has just in some blase way ignored the risks that are there for Australians to be able to ring 000 is just beyond belief. And they do need to face penalties for this. The government needs to crack down.
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“They do need to face penalties for this, the government needs to crack down.”
Littleproud said other towns have also suffered similar outages from other providers, including Dalby in Queensland, which didn’t have mobile service for two weeks from Telstra.
“You couldn’t make a triple-zero call on a mobile phone,” he said. “No one cared about us out here.
“Thargomindah, just to the west of me here in St George, went under. Two hundred and fifty lives were at risk and they had no mobile service because Telstra didn’t update the tower. So it’s not just Optus, we need to actually lean into these telcos.”
With Australia on the verge of bushfire season, the federal Coalition was calling for a broader independent investigation into the triple-zero network.
“There must be no delay in answers being provided and action taken to ensure Australians are safe,” federal opposition communications spokeswoman, Melissa McIntosh, said.
Rue defended not publicly revealing the outage until Friday night in a snap press conference more than a day after the problem was identified and rectified.
He said Optus was focused on determining the facts and conducting welfare checks before informing governments and the public.
– with Australian Associated Press