The catastrophic Optus outage claimed the life of a 74-year-old WA man, it has been confirmed, while the Federal Communications Minister has blasted the telco for not immediately alerting emergency services.

Annika Wells said on Saturday said she found it ‘hard to put into words” how such an incident could “be allowed to happen again”, referring to the telco’s November 2023 outage that left more than 2000 people unable to make triple-0 calls.

“Australians have every right to be livid that Optus can’t get these basics right,” she told reporters.

Ms Wells revealed the outage on Thursday lasted more than 10 hours - from just before 1am to 2pm - suggesting Optus should have immediately told emergency services rather than “when it was rectified”.

The company’s boss Stephen Rue announced the

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