Optus customer Simone Porcaro’s husband Dave slipped into unconsciousness after suffering a cellulitis infection.

The father-of-two could have gone into septic shock if it wasn’t for their young daughter’s quick thinking.

Simone is a Optus customer – but Dave is not.

“I just kept trying to dial, just freaking out, what were we going to do?” Simone told 9News.

“It was my seven-year-old daughter that had actually suggested using dad’s phone, so we found it underneath him because he was collapsed.”

Simone and her family are just some of the many Australians who were impacted by the Optus outage on Thursday.

A 68-year-old Adelaide woman died from a medical episode when she was unable to get through to triple zero.

“She was the most altruistic and caring person I’ve ever known,” her husband told 9News.

Rue said the calls were not adequately escalated within Optus’ system, meaning the telco was unaware of a major systemic failure until after 13 hours.

The inability to call triple zero affected South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory between 12.30am and 1.30pm on Thursday.

A total of three deaths have have so far linked to the outage.