Three Dead as Optus customers access to Triple-Zero fails during network upgrade

A sombre Stephen Rue, new Optus CEO fronted the media late on Friday to announce that three people had died after trying to contact Triple Zero yesterday during an outage of the system on the Optus Network.

Optus say they conducted a network upgrade and during that time a “technical failure” impacted Triple Zero calls.

This affected customers across South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Strangely, customers could still call normal landline or mobile numbers, only Triple Zero calls were affected.

Some 600 customers were directly impacted, and while conducting what are known as welfare checks, which is where the Telco contacts someone who was unable to call Triple Zero to see if they are ok, the company discovered that there were three households in which a person had passed away after trying unsuccessfully to call Triple Zero.

Optus CEO Stephen Rue says a complete investigation is now underway, but says “I want to offer a sincere apology to all customers who could not connect to emergency services when they needed them most,”

“And I offer my most sincere and heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the people who passed away. I am so sorry for your loss.”

“What has happened is completely unacceptable. We have let you down” he went on to say.

Optus will now need to work will relevant government agencies and regulators to investigate.

This tragic failure is yet another black mark on Optus’ record, following the Data Breach in 2022 and the massive 13 hour network outage in 2023.

It was during that Network outage that another Triple Zero failure occurred for Optus Customers. That incident affected 2,145 people during the course of the outage. Worryingly at the time, Optus then failed to conduct 369 welfare checks on people who had tried to make an emergency call during the outage according to ACMA who went on to fine Optus $12 million dollars for that breach.