By Alexandra Feiam,Duncan Evans

Copyright news

Kirsty McPherson told ABC Radio Adelaide on Monday she received a notification her mother had fallen from her personal mobility scooter and desperately tried to get her an ambulance.

“All I could hear was her screaming,” she said.

“What had happened is, she had had a fall and the scooter had fallen on top of her.

“I said, ‘mum, mum are you there?’ And I thought, ‘okay I’m just going to call an ambulance’.

“So I hung up and I dialled triple-0. It said ‘call failed’, twice, and beeped.”

Ms McPherson was one some 600 customers impacted by Thursday’s shock outage, which knocked out triple-0 calls across South Australia, Western Australia, NSW and the Northern Territory.

“I thought maybe I was in a bad reception area then I moved and it still didn’t work, I thought something is obviously going on,” she said.

Ms McPherson was at work at the time and she was able to use a landline to get through to triple-0.

The next day, Ms McPherson said she received a call from an Optus worker asking her if she still required emergency help.

When she said no, the Optus representative reportedly said, “good, good, thanks” and then hung up without giving her the reason for the call.

“The poor guy sounded so stressed,” she said.

“I still knew nothing about the outage at this time.”

She said she and her mother were “already in the process” of changing providers.

“It has also sparked conversations in my mum’s mind, that she wants to go into a nursing home now,” she said.

“We’re both with Optus, she doesn’t have faith that she is going to be able to get the help she needs in a timely manner.”

Optus has now been accused of widespread communications failures following the event.

The company failed to notify the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) of Thursday’s deadly outage event until after it had been resolved.

ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin, speaking to reporters alongside Communications Minister Anika Wells on Monday morning, said she and her team had only found out about the fatal event 10 hours after it had already been resolved.

“In this case we didn’t know that something had gone wrong until the matter had been resolved more than 10 hours later,” she said.

She added the emails ACMA had received from the telco were “perfunctory” but some “were inaccurate”.

“As part of our investigation, we need to look at just what information they need to provide to all of us when they can get it to us,” she said.

“It was just too late.”

ACMA is investigating the incident.

Ms Wells said Optus had “failed the Australian people” and warned the telco would face “significant consequences” after the catastrophic outage, which impacted triple-0 calls.

Four deaths have been associated with the event.

Ms Wells said the telco notified her about the outage on Thursday via email.

She said initial reports indicated about 100 calls were affected and she did not hear anything from the telco until later that afternoon with updated figures.

“We were told the outage affected 100 calls,’ she said.

“Then shortly after 4pm we were told the outage had affected 600 calls.

“Then we found out from our department that there had been three deaths and we were told there would be a press conference from the CEO of Optus shortly.”

She said the public had a right to “feel livid” about the outage and her focus was “getting to the bottom of what went wrong” and holding Optus to account.

Ms Wells said there would be “significant consequences” and Optus would be held to account.

“I will say it again for the people whose confidence must be shaken by what has come to light since late Friday afternoon, this is not good enough and it seems that Optus was told about this issue and did not act, which is not good enough,” she said.

“Optus and all telecommunications providers have obligations under Australian law to make sure emergency services calls go through.”

Ms Wells said this was the “second significant and egregious failure on the part of Optus”, though she said other telcos were not out of the clear.

“But also other telecommunications providers have had triple-0 outages as well. This is not entirely a matter for Optus,” she said.

The deadly outage started when the company conducted a firewall upgrade in South Australia about 12.30am on Thursday.

Normal calls were not impacted but some triple-0 calls could not be made.

The 13-hour outage then spread to WA, the NT and NSW.

Optus chief executive Stephen Rue has confirmed that Australians dialled into Optus’ offshore call centres to warn the company of the outage, but workers at the centre failed to escalate the warnings.

The company suffered a triple-0 outage in 2023 that impacted 2145 people.

In response to the 2023 event, Optus implemented 18 government recommendations to prevent any future outages.

Two triple-0 calls in NSW were impacted and on Monday, NSW Health Minister Ryan Park said the government would review its systems to “prevent this from happening”.

“This is a situation that concerns all of us,” he said.

“In relation to those two callers from New South Wales who are close to the border, what I am advised is that one of them was a mistaken call and then one of them didn’t need an ambulance.

“Both were checked in, given welfare checks by NSW Police and were checked so there wasn’t any impact on our patients or on our community.

“That doesn’t mean that this isn’t concerning for every emergency service across the country. It certainly is. We’ll have further discussions this week with both Telstra, from our perspective, and NSW ambulance.”