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Western Australia’s opposition emergency services spokesman Rob Horstman has called for a thorough investigation into the ‘untenable’ Optus outage that has left one person dead in WA and two in South Australia.
“My take on this really is the Universal Service Obligation needs to be strengthened,” he said.
WA Premier Roger Cook.Credit: Hamish Hastie
“I think that obviously the state government has a role, as they have done with many other issues in recent times, to put pressure on their federal government colleagues to ensure this happens.
“I mean that to me is that’s an untenable situation, which has resulted in three people tragically losing their lives across South Australia and WA, of course.”
The failure on Thursday affected about 600 Optus customers in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia after a network upgrade, leaving one West Australian dead, along with a 68-year-old woman and a baby boy in South Australia.
South Australia Police confirmed those who died included an eight-week-old boy but WA Police have yet to release any details of the WA death.
“Yesterday Optus conducted a network upgrade and within this process a technical failure impacted triple zero calls,” Optus chief executive Stephen Rue said on Friday.
“This resulted in the failure of a number of failed triple zero calls across South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.”
WA premier Roger Cook was on a plane to China when news of the incident broke on Friday afternoon.
In a statement he said that what occurred was “completely unacceptable”, adding that he was urgently seeking further information from Optus.
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A spokesperson for St John WA said they were not made aware of any issues involving Optus customers’ inability to contact Triple Zero, and had no briefing from Optus about any outage issues in recent days.
“Our thoughts are with those families impacted by this tragic news and are with our first responders,” Adam Hort, shadow minister for police said.
“It is hard to imagine the frustration that our men and women in blue must have felt when our community’s cries for help were unable to be answered.”
A WA Police spokesperson released a statement on Friday stating that they were in the process of conducting a number of welfare checks following the triple zero outage.
They said it was protocol for carriers to contact police when an outage has disrupted a triple zero call.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue said there would be a thorough investigation, but would not say for how long calls to the emergency number failed to go through.
“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.
Optus is expected to hold a second press conference on Saturday afternoon.
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