Baby boy and woman, 68, among those who died during Optus Triple Zero outage

An eight-week-old South Australian boy is one of the three people who died during the Triple Zero network outage that occurred due to a network upgrade by Optus on Thursday.

The failure affected about 600 customers in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, where calls to the emergency number failed.

Two of the deaths occurred in South Australia and one was in Western Australia.

South Australia Police confirmed in a statement those who died included an eight-week-old boy from Gawler West – a town about 43 kilometres north of Adelaide – and a 68-year-old woman from the Adelaide suburb of Queenstown.

“The circumstances of each death, including any impact of the outage, are being investigated and a report will be prepared for the state coroner in each case,” the statement said.

Optus chief executive Stephen Rue on Friday said the outage was “completely unacceptable” and a thorough investigation would occur, but would not say for how long calls to the emergency number failed to go through.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“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,” he said.

The telco could face fines of more than $10 million and other legal penalties.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas held his own press conference late on Friday, blasting the telco for a lack of communication and “reprehensible conduct”.

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“I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation in respect to communication worse than this,” Malinauskas told reporters.

“I cannot believe that anyone in a senior level from Optus thought they should craft a media statement and conduct a press conference before advising the South Australian government that they had ascertained two deaths had occurred.”

A November 2023 network meltdown affected about 10 million customers and left hundreds unable to get through to Triple Zero emergency services over 16 hours, and a September 2022 data breach was the worst in Australian corporate history.

Last year, the telco was made to pay a $12 million fine by the Australian Communications and Media Authority for breaching emergency call regulations.

An investigation by the authority found that during the nationwide network outage in 2023, Optus failed to provide Triple Zero access for more than 2000 people, and subsequently failed to conduct 369 welfare checks on those who had attempted to make emergency calls.

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