Australia's media regulator has initiated an investigation into a recent Optus outage that has been linked to four fatalities. Communications Minister Anika Wells stated that there will be repercussions for the telecommunications sector following this incident.

The outage, which occurred last week, primarily affected South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. It resulted in the failure of over 600 emergency calls over a span of 13 hours. Optus CEO Stephen Rue described the situation as "completely unacceptable" after revealing that three individuals had died due to the outage.

Nerida O'Loughlin, chair of the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA), noted on Monday that her agency was not informed of the outage until after it had been resolved. This is contrary to standard procedures, where the regulator typically receives multiple notifications daily as soon as a telecommunications company becomes aware of an issue.

"In this case, we didn't know that something had gone wrong until the matter had been resolved more than 10 hours later," O'Loughlin said. She added that the emails received from Optus were "perfunctory and some were inaccurate." It was not until late Friday, just before a press conference, that they learned about the 624 calls affected and the associated deaths.

Minister Wells reported that she was first informed of an outage affecting 10 calls on Thursday afternoon. She received no further updates until Friday, when she learned that the number of impacted calls had risen to 100. Shortly thereafter, she was informed that 600 calls had been affected, and soon after, her department notified her of the three fatalities.

"Optus has failed the Australian people in what has happened here. They can expect to suffer significant consequences as a result," Wells said. She expressed her disappointment in a conversation with Rue over the weekend, emphasizing the urgency of the situation.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, speaking from New York on Monday, expressed surprise that Rue had not considered resigning over the incident. He stated, "Quite clearly, Optus's behaviour is completely unacceptable, we have made that very clear. There'll be a proper investigation by the authorities and the government has action at its disposal, but the immediate concern will be that investigation. Find out the facts, exactly how this happened."

This incident marks the second time in recent years that an Optus outage has disrupted triple-0 calls. In 2023, ACMA found that Optus failed to provide access to the emergency call service for 2,145 individuals during a previous outage. The company also neglected to conduct 369 welfare checks on those who attempted to make emergency calls during that incident, resulting in penalties exceeding $12 million.

O'Loughlin remarked, "We didn't expect to be here again so soon, less than two years after that breach. As the minister said, we will, as the regulator, be holding Optus to account for this second outage over the last couple of years."