SYDNEY, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Australian federal and state governments on Saturday condemned the country's second-largest telecommunications company Optus, after three people died during a network outage that affected emergency calls.
Stephen Rue, the chief executive officer of Optus, revealed at a snap press conference in Sydney on Friday night that three people died after about 600 customers were unable to make calls to Australia's emergency telephone number, triple-0, on Thursday.
Authorities on Saturday identified those who died as an eight-week-old baby and a 68-year-old woman from South Australia (SA) and a 74-year-old man from Western Australia (WA).
Only Optus customers in SA, WA and the Northern Territory (NT) were affected by the outage, which was caused by a technical fault during a network upgrade.
Australia's Minister for Communications Anika Wells said on Saturday that Optus had "let Australians down."
"It would've been incredibly distressing for people to call triple-0 in their time of need and not be able to get through," she said. "The impact of this failure has had tragic consequences, and personally, my thoughts are with those families today."
Optus, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singaporean conglomerate Singtel, was in November 2024 fined more than 12 million Australian dollars (7.9 million U.S. dollars) for a similar national outage that occurred in November 2023. ■