Telstra boss Vicki Brady has apologized to the family of a Melbourne resident who died during a “technical incident” that affected Triple-0 services for more than an hour.
Multiple states were affected during Friday morning’s outage, with 148 of nearly 500 calls affected between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m.
In one case, a person in cardiac arrest was unable to immediately transfer the call to Ambulance Victoria and was found dead by paramedics.
Speaking to reporters, Ms Brady shared her “deepest apology” to the family and everyone affected by the incident.
Telstra boss Vicki Brady has apologized to the family of a Melbourne resident who died during a “technical incident” that affected Triple-0 services for more than an hour.
She said the telecoms giant would investigate whether there were “unacceptable” delays in routing the person’s call.
“Can I first offer my deepest apologies to that person’s family and to anyone who was affected during the 90 minutes,” she said.
‘At this stage we are in the very early stages of the investigation.
“I haven’t had a chance yet, and it hasn’t been appropriate to contact that family yet, but obviously we don’t understand yet the extent of the delay and the impact it had.”
During Friday’s outage, backup teams were forced to manually relay call details to emergency services, who then called back. Telstra has yet to confirm how many states and/or territories have been affected by the outage, which will be investigated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
A spokesperson for Triple Zero Victoria said Telstra told them the outage lasted approximately between 3.30am and 4.40am.
The agency was “told it could not route triple-0 calls to emergency services in multiple states, including Victoria.”
“During the disruption, Telstra provided Triple Zero Victoria with caller details to which they responded urgently,” he said.
Multiple states were affected during Friday morning’s outage, with 148 of nearly 500 calls affected between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m.
In NSW, early reports from emergency services suggested no triple-0 calls had been missed and calls for service were being handled as normal.
NSW Ambulance was able to continue receiving and processing triple-0 calls.
There were no faults with Fire Rescue NSW’s automatic fire alarm systems and a Telstra operator was able to call three lanes directly to FRNSW.
A NSW Police spokesperson said the triple-0 command line interface (CLI) feature that captures the caller’s number was not accessible between 3.40am and 5am.
However, callers could still reach the triple-0 operators and police could still respond to vacancies.
The spokesperson said NSW Police were not aware of any issues resulting from the outage and the situation has now been resolved.
Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the ACMA would conduct an initial assessment of “Telstra’s compliance with its legal obligations”.
She also said the government was “deeply saddened” by the death of the affected triple-0 caller.
“We are deeply saddened and our thoughts are with their family and friends,” she said.
“We have made inquiries with Telstra, the designated emergency responder, to understand the full impact of the disruption.
‘The ACMA will continue its investigation on this matter.’