Police boss confirms investigation after outage death
The SA Police Commissioner has given an update on a reported death during the Telstra outage on a prime-time breakfast radio slot.
SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens, who co-hosted the FiveAA breakfast radio program on Friday, confirmed SA Police are investigating a reported death from Wednesday’s Telstra outage.
Stevens said he understood a person was “conveyed to a regional hospital” after a failed triple-zero call.
“That person’s spouse did try and call triple-zero for an ambulance, that didn’t go through, so they utilised another phone,” Stevens said.
“We have an obligation to investigate that, so we’ll prepare a report for the Coroner, and that will take into account all the circumstances.
“It will be a matter for the Coroner to decide what the implications are.”
It comes after Senator Kerrynne Liddle said her office had been told a South Australian had resident died after apparently being unable to connect to triple-zero.
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SA Police said they had tried repeatedly to contact Liddle on Wednesday night. They finally spoke to her and one of her office staff on Thursday.
“As a result, contact was subsequently made with the family of an individual who died at a regional hospital on Wednesday,” police said.
They said they had started an immediate investigation into the cause and circumstances of the person’s death. No other details are yet available.
Meanwhile, Telstra faces questions from the federal government about why it took hours to issue an alert about the nationwide outage.
Australia’s largest telco has finished all additional triple-zero welfare checks as the government demands ”total transparency” over the crippling outage.
The communications regulator is investigating Telstra’s widespread network disruption, which hit transport, businesses, emergency services and healthcare across the country.
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The issue was largely resolved by mid-morning, and a solution for a separate “secondary issue” that prevented some users from making triple-zero calls was in place by Thursday afternoon.
Telstra advised customers to immediately retry emergency calls if they did not go through, with 639 welfare checks carried out.
A software issue affecting nodes responsible for keeping time across Telstra’s mobile network has been blamed for the outage.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said on Thursday night that the overwhelming majority of welfare checks had been done, with no adverse outcomes reported.
Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland described the back-to-back technical mishaps as “an unfortunate incident” that was unacceptable to customers.
“Mobile networks are complex and we will continue to work through further changes to ensure we have the most robust solution but customers can feel confident in calling triple zero,” he said.
The company said overnight work had reduced the separate triple-zero error by about 90 per cent as engineers continued to eliminate the bug.
Ackland said of it’s 639 welfare checks since Wednesday morning, 402 cases required followed-up voice calls, with 170 calls passed to police.
Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said there were still gaps in the emergency communications system that needed immediate plugging.
“It’s fair to say the Telstra outage … shines a further light on the whole triple-zero ecosystem to work much more effectively for end users than it did,” she told ABC News on Thursday.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has begun preliminary investigations into the outage.
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