Last night, Optus’s chief executive, Stephen Rue, revealed in a snap press conference that three people died after hundreds of triple-zero calls were unable to be made across South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory yesterday.

“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.

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 000.

Following this incident, they vowed it would never happen again.

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 000 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.