A fourth death has been confirmed by authorities following a technical failure during an Optus upgrade blocked calls to Triple Zero in three states for 13 hours.
Optus has first announced the fault led to three deaths, which were found to include an eight-week-old boy from Gawler West in South Australia, a 68-year-old woman from the Adelaide suburb of Queenstown and a 74-year-old man from Willetton, Western Australia.
This afternoon, WA Premier Roger Cook's office and WA Police revealed a 49-year-old from Perth also died after he unsuccessfully tried to contact Triple Zero.
READ MORE: Pilot's body recovered from plane crash wreckage in NSW national park
Optus said they were "saddened to learn of a new fatality in Western Australia" but would "continue to work with WA Police" to investigate the death.
"I am deeply saddened by this further news and extend my heartfelt condolences to the person's family and friends," Optus CEO Stephen Rue said in a statement.
"As stated earlier today I have asked for a full review into the circumstances relating to the failed network upgrade and impact on the Triple Zero network.
"I will also be working with my board and executive team to enable a full independent review of the entire incident including all the impacts and related information. This includes working closely with relevant agencies to establish the full facts."
The telco's chief executive officer revealed the outage in a snap press conference last night, saying it had resulted in the deaths of three people, after about 600 Triple Zero calls were unable to be made on Thursday.
He has since revealed a botched fire wall upgrade affected calls in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
Rue confirmed today the firewall upgrade began at 12.30am on Thursday and two customers contacted the company's call centre about the outage at about 9am.
He said an early review of the incident suggested the information was not escalated to the appropriate department.
Two complaints have since been raised with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.
"I will be able to say more about these in due course but I do want to be transparent that we now know we were informed by two individuals that they could not connect into Triple Zero," Rue said.
"This information was not surfaced with the relevant escalation at that time."
At about 1.30pm, another customer contacted Optus and Triple Zero access was restored.
Rue said about 600 people could not call emergency services during the outage.
Politicians slam telco
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas blasted the telco CEO last night, claiming that neither he nor the state's emergency services were given any information about the two deaths in the state.
"South Australian police didn't know. No one in SAS or ambulance service knew; my office didn't know. But then they conducted a press conference," said Malinauskas.
"I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation in respect to communications worse than this," he added.
READ MORE: Sydney doctor's 'hobby' nets $20k art prize
Western Australia's Premier, Roger Cook, also spoke out against the telco, deeming the outage "completely unacceptable."
Authorities that run emergency services across South Australia and Western Australia have both said they had no idea about the emergency service breakdown until the telco's impromptu 5.45pm press conference.
In 2023, Optus was fined $12 million for a similar outage that cut 2000 people off from contacting triple-zero.
Following this incident, they vowed it would never happen again.
Federal communications minister Anika Wells said Optus has "let Australians down when they needed them the most".
"We never want to see failures like this happen and we're disappointed that it's happened again," Wells said.
READ MORE: Late-night shows address Jimmy Kimmel suspension with humour and solidarity
"No Triple Zero outage is acceptable and this will be thoroughly investigated.
"It would've been incredibly distressing for people to call Triple Zero in their time of need and not be able to get through.
"The impact of this failure has had tragic consequences and personally my thoughts are with those families today.
"Optus and all telecommunications providers have obligations under Australian law to ensure they enable emergency services calls.
"Optus has let Australians down when they needed them the most and this isn't good enough."
Tech expert Trevor Long described this outage as a "more fundamental failure than the previous one" because, despite having network coverage, people were unable to contact emergency services.
"The Optus network overall was could make calls, take calls, call each other," he told Weekend Today.
"But the triple-zero component of the network didn't work."
The outage was caused by a technical failure in a network update, which brought down emergency calls across South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia.
DOWNLOAD THE 9NEWS APP: Stay across all the latest in breaking news, sport, politics and the weather via our news app and get notifications sent straight to your smartphone. Available on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
