An eight-week-old baby is among three people confirmed dead as a result of an outage of the triple-zero (000) emergency network affecting up to 600 households in South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory.
Australia’s second-largest telco, Optus, admitted responsibility at a press conference late on Sept. 19, saying a network upgrade had gone wrong, but gave few details. Chief Executive Stephen Rue said it was not clear why only emergency calls were affected or why backup systems did not take over.