An eight-week-old South Australian boy is one of the three people who died during the Triple Zero network outage that occurred due to a network upgrade by Optus on Thursday.
The failure affected about 600 customers in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, where calls to the emergency number failed.
Two of the deaths occurred in South Australia and one was in Western Australia.
South Australia Police confirmed in a statement those who died included an eight-week-old boy from Gawler West – a town about 43 kilometres north of Adelaide – and a 68-year-old woman from the Adelaide suburb of Queenstown.
“The circumstances of each death, including any impact of the outage, are being investigated and a report will be prepared for the state coroner in each case,” the statement said.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue on Friday said the outage was “completely unacceptable” and a thorough investigation would occur, but would not say for how long calls to the emergency number failed to go through.
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“I want to offer a sincere apology to all customers who could not connect to emergency services when they needed them most, and I offer my most sincere and heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the people who passed away,” he said.
The telco could face fines of more than $10 million and other legal penalties.
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