Source : the age
Queensland police have conducted welfare checks on more than 20 people whose emergency calls failed during Wednesday’s nationwide telecommunications outage, as the Crisafulli government demanded answers from Telstra over the network’s handling of the incident.
Initial reports showed 17 people, mostly in regional Queensland, had attempted to call Triple Zero but were unable to connect to services during the outage, which began about 4am Wednesday.
This figure was updated by Queensland police to 21 on Thursday morning.
The Queensland Ambulance Service were called to provide assistance to five of those 21 people, who have since been checked and their cases closed.
A police spokesperson said all failed calls were identified through the telecommunications provider, and Policelink conducted welfare checks which confirmed everyone’s safety and wellbeing.
“The Queensland Triple Zero service remains operational, and people who are experiencing an emergency should continue to call Triple Zero,” the Queensland Police Service said.
“Impacted customers should check with their provider about what the outage means for them.”
Queensland Health Minister Tim Nicholls said he was disappointed with Telstra after being told on Wednesday there were no missed calls.
“Then we find out that there were misses, and now we are waiting on further information as to what those misses actually were, and whether the callback system had worked.
“Telstra have some questions to answer as to why their fail-safe system has allowed that to occur.”
Premier David Crisafulli agreed the telco had questions to answer, and said “the more information [the government] receive, the more troubling it becomes”.
“Communication is everything in a disaster … you give the information to people and you keep giving the information,” he said.
“And we’re asking some pretty direct questions about that because a lot of the information changed and there was a lot of vacuums during the course of the day.
“It’s important that people get a full explanation because communications is life and death, particularly in a decentralised state like Queensland.”
More than 300 Triple Zero calls across Australia failed during Wednesday’s outage, caused by a 20-year “time travel” glitch triggered by issues with a firmware upgrade.
In a statement issued on Wednesday night, Telstra said a second network fault was continuing to affect some calls – including Triple Zero calls – hours after the telco scrambled to resolve the daytime outage.
Telstra said people calling Triple Zero might hear an error message while their phone tried to connect to another mobile network, and urged anyone who could not reach emergency services to wait up to 90 seconds. If that failed, Telstra urged customers to call from another phone.
Federal Communications Minister Anika Wells said on Thursday morning that she should have been told of the initial outage earlier, after revealing her office was informed of the issue at 7am, about four hours after the outage began.
“I would have liked to have heard earlier,” Wells told ABC radio. “It would seem there was some sort of delay.”
Telstra was fined more than $3 million in 2024 over an outage that stopped some customers reaching Triple Zero.
The company is facing potential penalties in the tens of millions of dollars over Wednesday’s issues.
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