Multiple people have died after a botched Optus network upgrade on Thursday prevented around 600 emergency calls to Triple Zero across Australia.
The deaths currently linked to the outage – which Optus only revealed to the public, emergency services and state/territory leaders on Friday evening at a press conference – include two men, aged 49 and 74, in Western Australia, and a 68-year-old woman in Adelaide.
The outage – plus Optus’s delayed response to it – has sparked fury and condemnation. “I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation in respect to communications worse than this,” South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas said.
