Federal Communications Minister Anika Wells says Optus “let Australians down” after an eight-week-old boy and two adults died during a 14-hour Triple Zero network outage on Thursday.

The criticism comes after South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas revealed that Optus initially told his government the outage lasted only two hours. It is now understood to have lasted about 14 hours.

The failure affected about 600 customers in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, where calls to the emergency number failed. Two of the deaths occurred in South Australia and one was in Western Australia.

Those who died included an eight-week-old boy from Gawler West – a town about 43 kilometres north of Adelaide, and a 68-year-old woman from the Adelaide suburb of Queenstown, a

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