Some of Australia’s top politicians are really angry at Optus after a major outage stopped people from calling triple zero, and sadly, three people died including a baby just eight weeks old.
The CEO of Optus came out in a last-minute press conference and admitted that the emergency call failures happened in South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory.
Leaders like South Australia’s Premier, Peter Malinauskas, are furious. He said that emergency services like ambulances and police weren’t even told about the issue until Optus announced it publicly. He called it one of the worst examples of poor communication he’s ever seen from a big company.
WA’s Premier, Roger Cook, also slammed Optus, saying the whole situation was unacceptable.
Emergency services in those states said they had no clue what was going on until the press conference at nearly 6pm way too late considering what had already happened.
What’s worse is that Optus had already been fined last year $12 million for a similar problem where around 2,000 people couldn’t call triple zero. Back then, they promised it wouldn’t happen again.
The Federal Communications Minister, Anika Wells, said Optus let everyone down at a time when people needed help the most. She said no one should ever be in a situation where they can’t reach emergency services, and that there’ll be a full investigation.
Experts are saying this outage was actually worse than the last one. Even though the rest of the Optus network seemed to be working like normal calls the system that connects to triple zero failed. Apparently, it happened after a network update.