‘Not good enough’: At least five customers tried to warn Optus of 000 outage

Optus has confirmed at least five customers tried to warn it about the Triple Zero outage now linked to multiple deaths, but call centre operators did not escalate those concerns because there were no “red flags” in the beleaguered telecommunication giant’s system.

South Australian police say a newborn boy is unlikely to have died as a result of the catastrophic Triple Zero failure on the Optus network despite his family being affected by the outage.

Optus CEO Stephen Rue speaks to the media on Sunday.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

On Sunday, the embattled telco’s chief, Stephen Rue, revealed the outage had affected two emergency calls made by NSW residents near the South Australian border.

As pressure mounted on Rue over why Optus waited 40 hours to inform the public about the Triple Zero failure affecting some 600 customers, he revealed that a review of call logs had found a further three customers contacted Optus to warn it about the outage, on top of the two it was already aware of.

But Rue said those warnings were ignored because the company was not already aware of the problem.

“As we had not detected the Triple Zero failures in our network at the time of these calls, there were no red flags for the contact centre to alert them to any issue,” he said. “This is clearly not good enough.”

Rue said Optus would now implement a compulsory “escalation process” for any reports of Triple Zero failures.

Optus operates call centres in Australia and overseas. Rue confirmed the calls were received by call centre workers offshore, but refused to comment on whether he believed those employees may not have appreciated the significance of a failure in the emergency network.

“The location of call centres is not a topic for today – what the topic is around is processes,” he said.

Optus is grappling with the fallout from the catastrophic Triple Zero failure.Credit: Renee Nowytarger

Optus has said it will appoint an independent reviewer to examine how a routine firewall update triggered the failure of the Triple Zero network and why there were no systems in place to alert it to the problem.

Among those originally thought to have died as a result of the incident on Thursday were an eight-week-old boy and a 68-year-old woman from South Australia, and two men from Western Australia, aged 49 and 74.

However, SA Police said on Sunday that preliminary investigations had found the outage was unlikely to have contributed to the death of the baby boy.

“The deceased boy’s grandmother has told investigating police that she attempted to call 000 using her mobile phone when she was alerted to the fact her grandson was not breathing,” SA Police said in a statement.

“When her call was not connected, she immediately used another mobile telephone in the house and was successfully connected to 000.”

The failure affected about 600 Optus customers in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, where calls to the emergency number failed. However, two emergency calls in NSW — from people in the western town of Broken Hill — also failed. Welfare checks had confirmed those people were not harmed as a result of the failure.

South Australian woman Kirsty McPherson said a notification from her mother’s fall detection necklace was the first warning that something had gone terribly wrong.

Elizabeth McPherson, 75, had collapsed and accidentally brought down her mobility scooter on top of her.

“I got the alert, and then all I could hear was screaming,” Kirsty said.

Adelaide mother and daughter Elizabeth McPherson, 75, and Kirsty McPherson, 46.

Working more than 40 minutes away from her mother’s house, Kirsty immediately dialled Triple Zero, but call after call from her mobile failed. Not long after, she was able to get in contact with emergency services via a landline.

As a former Triple Zero call taker herself, she said she was angry and shocked about the delayed welfare checks for people’s life-threatening moments.

“It could have been a lot different, Mum could have been trapped under that scooter for 40 minutes and had much more significant injuries than a bump on the head and a sore back,” she said.

In Western Australia, police said they were first notified about the outage almost 24 hours after it occurred, when the telco requested welfare checks related to 26 failed emergency calls.

However, the full extent of the catastrophic network failure was not realised until the following afternoon, when WA Police was notified of another 123 unsuccessful calls in a public media release.

WA Police Commander Jodie Pearson.Credit: 9News Perth

WA Police have now finished welfare checks on all 149 calls which did not make it through due to the outage, in the process confirming a second man had died in that state after not being able to call Triple Zero.

“The information that the Western Australian Police Force received was that it was a minor outage, that services had been fully restored, and that there were 26 calls for the WA Police Force to check,” Commander Jodie Pearson said.

Pearson said WA Police was not provided with the “fullness of the wheres and hows of that outage”.

The outage comes only two years after Optus suffered a major network failure in which Triple Zero access for more than 2000 people was cut off. The company was fined $10 million over the incident and its then chief executive, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, resigned.

Asked why customers should trust the network given the repeated failures, Rue said: “Because I am absolutely determined to ensure that what occurred, we get an independent review of that, we get recommendations about what we do, and I am determined that we will implement those.”

Rue said the Triple Zero network failure occurred while normal calls were still operating, contributing to the company not being aware of the problem for several hours.

When asked whether that meant similar problems may have occurred in the past, Rue said he was not aware of any other cases.

However, Ugo Tellini, who lives in Breakfast Point in Sydney’s inner west, questioned whether the network outage was a one-off.

The 74-year-old says he was forced to crawl to his car to be taken to hospital in the early hours of the morning after he and his wife were unable to call Triple Zero on the Optus network in June.

Ugo Tellini, 74, tried to call Triple Zero several times in June but couldn’t get through.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

Tellini and his wife, who did not want to be named, say they warned Optus they had been unable to connect to the emergency Triple Zero network when he woke in the early hours of the morning suffering from a pinched nerve in his spine.

But despite calls to Optus and a complaint to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, they say they never received an apology.

A screenshot of attempts to call Triple Zero from Sydney man Ugo Tellini’s phone in June.

Rue said he was not aware of the incident when asked on Sunday, though Optus was contacted for comment and the couple has written to him directly.

Tellini’s story raises new questions about the extent of the issues faced by Optus. He says he woke in “complete agony” and successfully called his wife, who was sleeping in the next room.

His wife, an Optus customer, tried to call Triple Zero 11 times but was unable to connect to the network. She was able to call Concord Hospital, but was told it was unable to arrange an ambulance.

They then used Tellini’s phone. He is a customer of Amaysim, a subsidiary of Optus which uses the telecommunications giant’s network. They tried to call Triple Zero seven times on that phone but were unsuccessful.

A screenshot of Tellini’s phone shows seven calls between 1.01am and 1.17am, which displayed as “cancelled”.

Tellini was eventually forced to crawl to the lift of his apartment building, before his wife drove him to Concord Hospital.

He and his wife raised the issue with Optus, but say they were told there were no issues with the network on that night. He said the response was vague and bewildering.

“It’s not about me, but they should have learnt from what happened to me,” he said. “If they acted on it, it might not have happened again to these other poor people.”

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