OPINION: Triple zero is sacred in this country. We hold dear the ability to reach emergency services when faced with a crisis. Paramedics, police and fire crews are a simple phone call away.

As part of their licence to operate in this country, telecommunications providers must guarantee they can deliver calls to emergency services.

The failure of Optus to provide that essential service is beyond the pale and now tragic in the extreme, with confirmation of a fourth death as a direct result, including an 8-week-old baby boy.

“Reprehensible” is how a furious South Australian Premier described Optus’ actions – not just for the catastrophic triple zero outage, but for failing to keep police and government in the loop in the three affected states and territories – South Australia, West Australia and the Northern Territory.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas says there was a ‘bewildering’ lack of information from Optus, with SA Police only given the names and addresses of those who died after the Premier made a direct call to the Optus CEO Stephen Rue. That is shameful.

It’s staggering that a routine system upgrade could fail in such a catastrophic way, but it’s made even worse by the fact Optus let the country down with a triple zero outage on a much larger scale only two years ago.

In 2023, more than two thousand people across the country had no access to emergency services after a nationwide outage from Optus, which also failed to conduct welfare checks on hundreds of people who tried but couldn’t get through to triple zero.

It was luck more than anything that no one died then.

600 people were not able to call triple zero during this outage, and four families are now grieving loved ones because of this corporate catastrophe.

Optus was fined $12 million dollars after the 2023 network outage and vowed it would never happen again. And here we are.

Optus has many questions to answer.

Why was there no in-built alarm to alert the telco that the network upgrade had blocked Triple Zero calls? Optus had no idea the system wasn’t working and did nothing to fix it for at least 13 hours.

It then took 32 hours for the public to be told.

Normal calls were unaffected, but two people contacted Optus directly hours after the emergency services system was down to alert the telco they couldn’t get through.

Those customers were ignored by Optus which failed to escalate their calls.

Australians need to know that every telecommunications provider can function and allow them to reach emergency services in their time of greatest need.

If Optus can’t deliver, perhaps it’s time to reconsider the telco’s licence to operate in this country.