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“The information that the Western Australian Police Force received was that it was a minor outage, that services had been fully restored, and that there was 26 calls for the WA Police Force to check,” she said.
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“Our immediate concern was those 26 persons that were trying to call triple zero, and we immediately implemented those welfare check protocols.”
Pearson said WA Police was not provided with the “fullness of the wheres and hows of that outage”.
She declined to detail the fatal incidents that led to the death of a 74-year-old Willetton man and a 49-year-old Kensington man, only saying that there was no associated police investigation, and that the men’s deaths would be subject to coronial investigations.
Earlier on Sunday, Acting Premier Rita Saffioti said the state’s politicians also learnt of the full extent of the catastrophic network failure on Friday afternoon.
She said Premier Roger Cook had spoken with Optus chief executive Stephen Rue before flying out on a trade trip to Japan and China.
“It’s clear that Optus has failed the Western Australian public,” she said.
“I was shocked to find out exactly the extent of that failure. These things should not happen, and my sincere condolences go out to the two families.”
Saffioti said police had contacted the families of the two people who died in WA when they couldn’t call triple zero.
She said protocols to notify emergency services in the event of an outage – put in place after the telco’s much-publicised 2023 network failure – appeared to not have been followed.
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“It is a fact that there were protocols that, should an outage occur, then the state emergency services need to be notified, and that did not happen, and that is the key part here,” she said.
“So an outage occurred and no one knew about it, and that meant people were not prepared in case of an emergency.
“If there were some notifications, if it was broadcast, then there might have been some other action that could have been taken to mitigate some of those circumstances.”
Saffioti brushed aside questions on whether Optus should be stripped of the naming rights for Perth Stadium – there the WAFL grand final was being played on Sunday – but didn’t write it off either: “That’s not our focus at the moment, our focus is really understanding what transpired.”
The revelation WA Police was in the dark as to the true extent of the outage comes as Optus confirmed at least five customers tried to warn it about the network problem, but call centre operators did not escalate those concerns because there were no “red flags” in the system.
Rue on Sunday told media the company would implement a compulsory “escalation process” for reports of triple-zero failures.
He confirmed the warnings were received by offshore call centre workers, but refused to be drawn on whether those workers may not have appreciated the significance of a failure in Australia’s emergency network.
Also on Sunday, it was revealed preliminary investigations found the outage was “unlikely” to have contributed to the death of a baby boy in South Australia, as initially feared.
