Overview

• More than 600 emergency-call attempts failed across South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, with two cases reported near the NSW border, during a disruption from about 12:30am to early afternoon on Thursday.
• Optus says a routine firewall change caused the failure and admits call-centre staff did not escalate early customer warnings due to a lack of system alerts, with the company now mandating escalation for any Triple Zero reports and appointing an independent reviewer.
• Welfare checks have linked multiple deaths to the outage, initially three and later reported as four, while police say the death of an eight-week-old in South Australia is unlikely to have been caused by the failure.
• ACMA says it was notified only after the outage had been resolved and that initial emails from Optus were perfunctory or inaccurate, as the communications minister declared the telco had failed Australians.
• Financial penalties are in play under ACMA powers, with Optus previously fined more than $12 million for a 2023 Triple Zero failure, and the prime minister said he would be surprised if the CEO was not considering his position.