Heat dials up over outage, while police probe death
Source: AAP
South Australia Police have confirmed they are investigating a death that reportedly happened during Wednesday’s Telstra outage.
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.
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 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.
“The government is waiting on reports from an outstanding 13 welfare checks from states and territories,” she said.
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 the company had completed 639 welfare checks since Wednesday morning. Customer reports suggest problems began about 3am and Telstra said it became aware by about 4.30am.
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Of those, 402 cases required followed-up voice calls, with 170 calls passed to police.
Ackland defended how long Telstra took to notify Wells. Her office did not learn of the outage until about 7am on Wednesday.
Wells has since demanded “total transparency” from the telco, saying it should have acted as soon it became aware of something the public needed to know.
“What Telstra knew, when they knew it and how they communicated it to stakeholders will be the subject of investigation,” she said on Thursday.
“Telstra needs to account for how and why that has occurred because Australians are right to expect that as a baseline service from their telco.”
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.
Meanwhile, transport operators continue to deal with the fallout from Wednesday’s outage.
All regional V/Line train services across Victoria were suspended as signalling systems were tested, with delays and cancellations continuing into Thursday night.
In 2025, Wells increased penalties for telcos that fall foul of their triple-zero obligations to $30 million.
Asked whether individuals within Telstra should be punished, Wells said her focus was getting services back online.
“Then investigation can take foot, and we can learn out of that, and penalties can be administered, justice can be served,” she said.
It is the third major national outage in less than a year for the $56 billion giant, which powers about 25 million Australian mobile services.
—with AAP
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