A prominent legal expert suggests that Optus might confront ‘substantial’ repercussions following the deaths of three individuals, including an eight-week-old infant, due to the disruption of their emergency calls amid a network enhancement.

The major outage affected Triple Zero calls in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia on Thursday.

Stephen Rue, the chief executive of Optus, stated on Friday, ‘I have been informed that, during the execution of welfare checks, three of the emergency calls were associated with households where a person unfortunately died.’

It sparked a scathing response from South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas.

‘I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation in respect to communications worse than this,’ Malinauskas said.

He further expressed disbelief that anyone at the senior levels of Optus would prioritize crafting a media statement and holding a press conference over notifying the South Australian government upon determining two fatalities had transpired.

‘I think quite frankly that is reprehensible conduct on behalf of Optus.’

Sam Macedone, a solicitor since 1970, indicated that Optus might be liable for civil compensation and damages as a result of the outage. 

He told Channel Nine’s Weekend Today program that Optus had breached its duty of care to its customers during the outage on Thursday. 

‘You would have to prove that the deaths were as a direct result of the fact that you couldn’t get onto triple zero and not for some other reason,’ Mr Macedone said.

‘If you could establish all those things, then I think Optus is going to face some huge claims for compensation.’

SA Police on Thursday said an eight-week-old boy from Gawler West, 43km north of Adelaide, and a 68-year-old woman from Queenstown, in the north-west, had died. 

A third person, who is yet to be identified, died in Western Australia. 

Optus’ chief executive on Friday confirmed the telco had conducted a network upgrade on Thursday and that a technical failure had impacted emergency calls. 

‘This resulted in the failure of a number of triple zero calls,’ Mr Rue said. 

‘Our investigation is ongoing, but at this stage I can confirm that approximately 600 customers were potentially impacted, of which a proportion of their calls did not go through.’

Mr Macedone suggested Optus hadn’t learned its lesson after it suffered the biggest mobile network outage in Australia’s history in November 2023.

Optus was fined more than $12million in penalties for breaching emergency call rules during the outage. 

An investigation found the telco had failed to provide access to emergency services for 2,145 people and had subsequently failed to conduct welfare checks on 369 people who had tried to make an emergency call. 

Mr Rue said it was ‘crucial’ that Australians have access to emergency services.  

‘Before you do any upgrade, you should put in place plans that if something goes wrong you can immediately put things back in operation again, you just can’t let the thing fall apart for hours and hours,’ the lawyer said. 

‘There were 600 people that tried to get through and that is just not acceptable and I’m pretty sure that the statutory obligations have been breached all over the place.

‘It is non-negotiable and we’re talking about deaths here, and if those deaths were caused by the fact that you couldn’t get onto triple zero, then huge consequences will follow.’

There are still unanswered questions from the outage, including why only triple zero calls, rather than all calls, were affected.

Communications Minister Anika Wells said the outage was an ‘incredibly serious and completely unacceptable’ incident.

‘The impact of this failure has had tragic consequences and my personal thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one,’ Ms Wells said.

‘Optus and all telecommunication providers have obligations to ensure they carry emergency services calls.’

Daily Mail has contacted Optus for comment.