Optus has confirmed that at least five calls made to its customer service centre, warning that customers could not contact triple zero, failed to be escalated.
CEO Stephen Rue revealed on September 21 that three additional calls have been identified, on top of the two announced on September 20, where customers reported being unable to reach the emergency line.
Rue said the calls were not properly escalated within Optus’ systems, meaning the company did not realise it was facing a major failure until 13 hours later.
“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 live issues,” Rue told media at Optus’ Sydney headquarters.
“This is not clearly good enough and we are implementing a new compulsory escalation process following any customer reports of triple zero failures through our customer call centre.
“Because there was no indication of a general network issue. What the operators did was try and troubleshoot.”
The outage, which hit South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory between 12.30am and 1.30pm on September 18, has so far been linked to three deaths.
A fourth case – the death of an eight-week-old baby boy in Adelaide’s north – was initially thought to be connected, but police now believe the outage is unlikely to have played a role.
Rue has now said two of the calls reporting the issue came from New South Wales. He explained this was probably because callers were near the South Australian border and connected through towers there.
Welfare checks have since been carried out, with no serious injuries or deaths reported in connection to those two calls. Rue confirmed he had not personally listened to the recordings.
“I have been doing a multiplicity of things, one of my senior members of my team has done that,” he said when asked why.
Rue also dismissed suggestions of a surge in calls during the outage or broader disruptions elsewhere in the country.
“That is what our call logs show, and the team has looked at it on multiple occasions,” he said.
“The call volumes in this case looked normal.”
He added that the location of Optus’ call centres – including some offshore operations – had no bearing on the outage.
“The location is not really a topic for today,” he said.
“What the topic is around our processes and ensuring that the processes are in place.”
Nationals leader David Littleproud said Optus had failed Australians by neglecting their responsibility to guarantee access to emergency services.
“It’s abhorrent behaviour, they have a responsibility,” he told Weekend Today.
“This is a universal service and a universal right for Australians to be able to use in their hour of need, and the fact that Optus has just, in some blasé way, ignored the risks that are there for Australians to be able to ring triple zero is just beyond belief.
“They do need to to face penalties for this, the fact that the government wasn’t even advised until some many hours and days after is frightening.”
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas also urged caution over Optus’ explanations, noting he anticipated further incidents could still be revealed.
“We’re very cautious of accepting everything that Optus says up until this point,” he said.
“There is still more work to be done in terms of our analysis of their conduct.”
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