Cardiac arrest victim’s family reportedly struggled to call for help after late night Telstra outage

A Melbourne dad died while his family was trying to call an ambulance during a nationwide triple-0 “technical incident”.

A Melbourne dad died while his family was trying to call an ambulance during a nationwide triple-0 “technical incident” on Friday.

Telstra has issued a public apology over the outage, during which more than 100 callers struggled to contact emergency services.

Telstra’s operators – who are first to answer every triple-0 call in Australia – were unable to transfer 148 of ­almost 500 calls to the correct state and emergency services for more than an hour.

Among these was a call in Fitzroy for a man, aged in his 50s, who had suffered a cardiac arrest and was later pronounced dead by paramedics.

An investigation is under way to determine whether any delays from the Telstra outage contributed to that death.

A Telstra outage on Friday meant people were unable to be put through to emergency services. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

Many states were hit by the outage which resulted in operators being forced to email callers’ details to emergency agencies between 3.30am and 5am. The outage is now being investigated by the national watchdog, the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Ambulance Victoria said it was “concerned about the possible impacts to patients” and was seeking details from Telstra and Triple Zero Victoria.

“We’re working to review all cases during this period to identify if there have been any impacts to patient care,” acting operational communications executive director Danielle North said.

Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady said they did not know what caused the outage but the system was fixed by 5am after a server restart.

She apologised to the family of the patient who suffered the fatal cardiac arrest and said it was “unacceptable if there was any delay in getting that call through”.

“Can I just first offer my deepest apologies to the family of that person and to anyone who was impacted in the 90 minutes,” she said.

“I fully appreciate that when members of the public need to use triple-0 it is an emergency situation.”

Ms Brady said their systems were now stable.

However, Telstra did not respond to repeated questions as to whether it could guarantee there would be no repeat.

Victorian Ambulance Union general secretary Danny Hill said while they did not know whether the delay caused the death, members reported the traumatised family received a call asking if they still needed an ambulance after paramedics had already pronounced their loved one had died.

The family of a man that died struggled to get through to agency callers when they dialled Triple Zero. Picture: Wayne Taylor

The Telstra outage took place between 3.30am and 5am on Friday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Geraghty

“The family had described trying to get through on several occasions, but had been unable to,” he said.

Mr Hill said it was concerning that callers had to speak to Telstra operators instead of agency call-takers who had specific training to ask certain questions and give medical ­advice as needed.

“When you have to email for an ambulance, that’s pretty bad,” he said.

The Herald Sun understands that triple-0 Victoria responded to calls within their targeted times from when they were notified about them, but it is not yet known how long the delay was between callers first dialling triple-0 and agencies learning of their case.

In some cases, Victorian call-takers received emails with bulk-lists of calls from the Telstra operator, meaning multiple jobs came in at once with little detail on which cases should be prioritised.

A Triple Zero Victoria spokesman said they were notified of a disruption from 3.30am and “Telstra provided the details of callers who were responded to as a matter of urgency” throughout the issue.

Swinburne University corporate governance expert Helen Bird said the outage “caused chaos and panic” and that Telstra’s board “must now ask hard questions” of some executives, particularly when last year’s Optus debacle highlighted the risk of triple-0 failures.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the federal government had “urgently sought information from Telstra to understand the full extent and impact of the outage”.

This is the second outage to hit triple-0 in less than six months, with more than 2600 triple-zero calls from Optus customers unanswered during the company’s nationwide outage on November 8.