Leaders have called for tougher penalties after a deadly Optus outage resulted in three deaths including an eight-week old baby.

An upgrade resulted in a technical failure that left customers in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia unable to phone triple-0 for 10 hours on Thursday.

Optus chief executive officer Stephen Rue fronted media on Friday evening to confirm three people had died who were unable to call emergency services during the outage.

Shadow Communications Minister Melissa McIntosh said a $12m fine that Optus faced last year had not prevented this horrible incident form happening.

Ms McIntosh said a review by government following a similar Optus incident resulted in a number of recommendations being implemented.

“This is people’s lives, three peop

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