Overview

• Optus says about 600 customers in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were unable to connect to triple zero during Thursday’s outage, which affected emergency calls rather than normal services.
• The company has launched an independent review and introduced a compulsory escalation process after admitting two customer warnings about failed 000 calls were not properly elevated and that no alarms flagged the fault.
• Authorities have linked four deaths to the incident, with SA Police later advising the outage is unlikely to have contributed to the death of an eight‑week‑old boy as a second phone connected, while inquiries continue into a 68‑year‑old SA woman and two WA men.
• Officials say the disruption lasted about 10 hours, longer than initially conveyed, and police conducted widespread welfare checks on callers whose emergency attempts failed.
• Federal and state leaders condemned the lapse, ACMA is preparing investigations, and Optus faces potential multi‑million‑dollar penalties as concerns mount about emergency call handover protections and two additional failed calls on the NSW border are confirmed.