Australia’s Optus blames departure from ‘established processes’ for emergency calls outage

SYDNEY: Optus, Australia’s No. 2 telecom carrier, said on Sunday that a departure from regular processes on a network upgrade sparked a technical failure that disrupted emergency call services for 13 hours and has been linked to four deaths.

There has been growing outcry in Australia over the glitch, which Optus said occurred during a network firewall upgrade from 12:30 a.m. on Thursday (1430 GMT on Wednesday) until about 1:30 p.m. and potentially impacted 600 customers.