2 hours ago
2
On Sunday, the SA Police said it had completed its own welfare checks on all 154 Optus customers impacted by the outage, saying “no further adverse outcomes have been reported”.
Loading
South Australian woman Kirsty McPherson said a notification from her mother’s fall detection necklace was the first warning that something had gone terribly wrong.
Elizabeth McPherson, 75, was preparing for a trip to the shops when she collapsed and accidentally brought down her mobility scooter on top of her.
“I got the alert, and then all I could hear was screaming,” Kirsty said.
Working more than 40 minutes away from her mum’s house, Kirsty immediately dialled Triple Zero, but call after call from her mobile failed. Not long after, she was able to get in contact with emergency services via a landline.
Kirsty did not realise there had been a widespread outage until she received a call from Optus 24 hours later, asking if she still needed help.
Adelaide mother and daughter Elizabeth McPherson, 75, and Kirsty McPherson, 46.
As a former Triple Zero call taker herself, she said she was “angry and shocked” about the delayed welfare checks for people’s life-threatening moments.
“It could have been a lot different, Mum could have been trapped under that scooter for 40 minutes and had much more significant injuries than a bump on the head and a sore back,” she said.
“I can’t imagine the anxiety and the absolute despair of the people trying to connect and not ever getting through.
“It’s raised questions in our household now, my mum has actually said, ‘I think I want to go into a nursing home because I can’t trust that I’m going to be able to get through to those services when I need them.’”
Outage not a one-off, says Sydney man
As Optus grapples with the fallout from a catastrophic Triple Zero failure now linked to at least deaths, Ugo Tellini, who lives in Breakfast Point in Sydney’s inner west, had questioned whether the network outage reported by the telecommunications giant on Friday was a one-off.
The 74-year-old says he was forced to crawl to his car to be taken to hospital in the early hours of the morning after he and his wife were unable to call Triple Zero on the Optus network in June.
Tellini and his wife, who did not want to be named, say they warned Optus in June that they had been unable to connect to the emergency Triple Zero network when he woke in the early hours of the morning suffering from a pinched nerve in his spine.
A screenshot of attempts to call Triple Zero from Sydney man Ugo Tellini’s phone in June.
But despite calls to Optus and a complaint to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, they say they never received an apology.
Optus has been contacted for comment.
Tellini’s story raises new questions about the extent of the issues faced by Optus. He says he woke in “complete agony” after suffering what he later learnt was a pinched nerve in his spine.
He successfully called his wife, who was sleeping in the next room, for help, and asked her to call an ambulance.
His wife, an Optus customer, tried to call Triple Zero 11 times, but was unable to connect to the network. She was able to call Concord Hospital, but was told they were unable to arrange an ambulance.
They then used Tellini’s phone.
He is a customer of Amaysim, a subsidiary of Optus which uses the Telecommunications giant’s network. They attempted to call Triple Zero seven times on that phone but were unsuccessful.
Optus CEO Stephen Rue speaks to the media on Saturday.Credit:
A screenshot of Tellini’s phone shows seven calls between 1.01am and 1.17am, which displayed as “cancelled”.
Tellini was eventually forced to crawl to the lift of his apartment building, before his wife drove him to Concord Hospital.
Tellini and his wife raised the issue with Optus, but say they were told there were no issues with the network on that night. He said the response was “vague” and “bewildering”.
“It’s not about me, but they should have learnt from what happened to me,” he said.
“If they acted on it, it might not have happened again to these other poor people.”
The embattled telco’s chief, Stephen Rue, revealed on Saturday that Optus was first warned the Triple Zero network had failed on Thursday morning, about nine hours after the outage occurred, after receiving calls from customers.
Loading
Those warnings, from two customers at about 9am, were not acted upon.
“Early reviews suggest we did not handle these calls as would be expected,” Rue said on Saturday, revealing that complaints had been made to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.
It took another four hours and more calls before the fault was fixed.
“We became aware of the severity of the incident when a customer contacted us directly at around 1.30pm on Thursday,” he said.
“We were further notified by South Australian police shortly thereafter.”
By then, the outage had persisted for more than 13 hours.
The family of the 68-year-old Queenstown woman said they were mourning the loss of their beloved wife and sister, and hope authorities investigate the “terrible circumstances” of the outage, so other families do not experience a similar tragedy.
Northern Territory Police Force said there were eight emergency calls in the state that did not go through, and there were no injuries or deaths associated with the Optus outage.
