The wife of an Adelaide man has revealed she was forced to use her unconscious husband's fingerprint to unlock a phone for help, during Optus' triple-zero outage. The telcos has admitted it missed warnings about the malfunction.

Adelaide

Several Optus customers were unable to contact emergency services during a recent network outage, including a woman in Adelaide who could not call for an ambulance for her husband. In another case, two customers in New South Wales were unable to connect to triple zero as their calls were routed through a South Australian tower. Optus has acknowledged the failure, attributing it to processes not being followed during a system upgrade, and has since halted further network changes while implementing new monitoring and escalation procedures. Authorities are investigating the impact of the outage, with police stating that the incident was an unlikely factor in the death of an eight-week-old boy, and a coronial inquest has been launched in Western Australia following the discovery of another victim.

Optus admits outage failures as more stories emerge

Simone Piccaro has been a loyal Optus customer for 15 years, but says the telco failed her when she needed help most. It just makes me angry as well, just because I should be able to call triple 0. When she tried to call for an ambulance on Thursday morning for her husband, Simone couldn't get through. In the panic, her quick-thinking seven-year-old daughter said, let's try Dad's phone, it's with Telstra. The mother of two was then forced to manoeuvre her husband's body while he laid unconscious. So we found the phone sort of right tucked underneath him and then we've kind of moved his arm to try and manoeuvre his thumb, so a couple of attempts to get his thumb into the thumbprint so that we can unlock that phone. Her husband Dave's now in hospital with a serious leg infection. While Simone did receive a welfare check from Optus, she says there was no compassion shown. A bit of a scripted call, they were offering me emergency services over 26 hours later. It was just to tick a box. Today, the company's CEO offered this to customers. I would like to apologise to everyone impacted. The death of an eight-week-old boy from Adelaide's northern suburbs rocked the country. However, SA Police say its preliminary investigations revealed the outage was an unlikely factor in his death. Revelations today are further two customers in New South Wales also tried to call for help. They couldn't connect as they were near the border and their calls were being directed to a South Australian tower. We are most concerned about, is it necessary recriminations on Optus, but rather making sure that the triple zero call system is as robust as possible. Optus has blamed the outage on pre-established processes that weren't followed when technicians tried to upgrade the system. We've put in place an immediate halt to further changes in our network system. As the number of calls to Optus alerting them to the unfolding issue ballooned to five, the CEO today confirmed those calls were made to an offshore call centre. The location of call centres is not really a topic for today. What the topic is around our processes and ensuring that the processes are in place. The Telco says it's now monitoring the call loads through to triple zero, state by state, 24 hours, seven days a week. It's also implementing new escalation processes upon any customer reports of emergency call failures. After the discovery of another victim late yesterday, WA Police will be launching a coronial inquest into the situation. There was no fullness of the where's and how's of that outage. This is a terrible failure, a terrible failure, beyond imagination of what happened. Josh Webster, 10 News.

Optus, Australia's second-largest telecom carrier, promised on Saturday "full cooperation" with official investigators, after an outage disrupted emergency call services for 13 hours. Four people died amid the technical failure, including an eight-week-old boy.

Melbourne

Telco vows to cooperate after deadly outage

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Tel Aviv-Yafo

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Phoenix

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Kyiv

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Heathrow Airport

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Tallinn

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Sacramento

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Orem

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Breakdown