It was about midday on Thursday when paramedics in South Australia realised something was wrong. The state’s ambulance service, long strained by huge demand and ramping, was quieter than usual.
About the same time, a 70-year-old man in Adelaide began to panic. Chris Tyndall was struggling to breathe and, having lived through two heart attacks and a quadruple bypass, knew he needed help. He managed to get to his phone and dial triple zero.
But as an Optus customer, his repeated calls were met with silence.
“I couldn’t afford not to have an ambulance,” said Tyndall, who tried to call triple zero about midday. “I couldn’t get out of bed. When I eventually got to the hospital, they told me I had influenza A.”
Kirsty McPherson was also panicking. She was at work when an alert system worn by her mother sounded. When the system automatically connected McPherson to her mother, the older woman yelled that she was stuck underneath her mobility scooter.
“All I could hear was her screaming,” McPherson told ABC radio.
McPherson tried to call triple zero twice on her mobile, but was also met with silence. She managed to call an ambulance from a landline phone. It wasn’t until the next day that she received a call from an Optus representative, asking if she still needed help.
Adelaide woman Simone Porcaro was also unable to call emergency services for her husband, who had collapsed and fallen unconscious. She told Channel 10 it was her seven-year-old daughter who suggested she unlock her husband’s phone with his thumb and call for help. Her husband was not an Optus customer.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
South Australian government sources say that as McPherson, Tyndall and Pocaro sought help, paramedics and police compared notes and called Optus to alert them to a problem.
A short time later, about 1.50pm, the network stopped a routine update to its firewall – launched more than 12 hours earlier – which had caused the problem.
South Australian government sources say they heard nothing further until the telco’s chief executive, Stephen Rue, held a press conference at 5.30pm on Friday to reveal three people who had called triple zero during the outage had died, including an eight-week-old baby.
On Saturday afternoon, WA police confirmed a fourth death.
That delay is “a problem from my perspective”, the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, told the ABC on Monday.
“Our emergency services have important work to do. If Optus has time to sit on information and has time to craft press conferences and strategise before letting us know, that’s not good enough.”
Optus also received an earlier warning from a customer who contacted its call centre to warn triple-zero calls were not working. A second complaint was made shortly before the problem was resolved.
Those complaints were not escalated by Optus, which has announced similar complaints will be automatically escalated to management in future.
By the time the outage was resolved, more than 600 households in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory had been impacted.
The chief executive of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, Carol Bennett, said it was “astounding” that emergency services alerted Optus to the outage, rather than the other way.
“Clearly, there has been a catastrophic failure here in process,” Bennett said. “The fact that red flags and alerts were not in place, when people were contacting Optus to tell them this was happening, is shocking and tragic.”
Authorities in Western Australia have also been scathing. They were contacted by Optus about 9pm on Thursday, several hours after the problem was fixed, and told 26 triple-zero calls had failed to connect.
after newsletter promotion
That number surged to 123 the next day, when police confirmed a West Australian who had attempted to call emergency services had died.
“The WA Police Force were not advised of these deaths or the scale of the outage prior to this public media release,” the WA police commander, Jodie Pearson, said on Sunday.
The state’s premier, Roger Cook, has called for an investigation into the outage by the Australian Communications and Media Authority to consider the delayed notification from Optus.
The authority’s chair, Nerida O’Loughlin, said Optus had not contacted it until the matter was resolved. She said the authority usually received multiple emails a day when a telco was aware that something has gone wrong with its network.
Optus was contacted for comment and a response to the South Australian government’s claims. The telco’s CEO has apologised and described the outage as “completely unacceptable”.
The communications minister, Anika Wells, has condemned the company for having “failed the Australian people” and noted it was fined $12m for similar failures in 2023.
“You would be unsurprised to hear that I expressed my unbelievable disappointment that we were here again so quickly,” Wells said.
“Or here again at all.”
ACCAN’s Bennett said Optus had “clearly not learned from its previous experience”.
“The guarantee we got last time that this wouldn’t occur again has not been followed through on,” Bennett said. “There have also been systemic failures in not red flagging complaints that the service isn’t working properly, and then not communicating and informing relevant agencies and the public.”
Now out of hospital, Tyndall is calling on the government to punish Optus and hold it accountable.
His feedback for the telco is blunt.
“You are costing people their lives,” Tyndall said. “Something needs to be done.”