By Lewis Wiseman, ABC
Over 600 emergency calls were affected. Photo: 123rf
Three people have died after a "technical failure" impacted hundreds of triple-0 calls on the Optus network, its CEO has revealed.
Optus CEO Stephen Rue confirmed that a technical problem resulted in the failure of triple-0 emergency calls in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
The calls were impacted by a network update on Thursday, the CEO said.
Two of the deaths from South Australia and one was from Western Australia.
"Our investigation is ongoing but at this stage I can confirm that approximately 600 customers were potentially impacted, of which a proportion of their calls did not go through," he said.
"During the process of conducting welfare checks, three of the triple-0 calls involved households where a person tragically passed away."
He confirmed the technical failure has now been rectified.
"I want to offer a sincere apology to all customers who could not connect to emergency services when they needed them most," he added.
"I am so sorry for your loss. What has happened is completely unacceptable. We have let you down."
Rue confirmed that normal calls were going through in those regions and it was just the triple-0 service that was affected.
"You have my assurance that we are conducting a thorough investigation and once concluded, we will share the facts of the incident publicly," he said.
"We will cooperate fully and transparently with all relevant government agencies and regulatory bodies while we investigate this matter further."
In November last year, Optus was hit with over $12 million in penalties after more than 2,100 customers were unable to call triple-0 during an outage.
An investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found the telco also failed to conduct more than 300 welfare checks on those who had tried to make an emergency call during the outage.
- ABC
