'Reprehensible conduct': Top politicians slam Optus following fatal power outage

Optus is under immense pressure from politicians across the nation for the way it has handled an outage that led to three deaths, including an eight-week-old baby.

Last night, Optus's chief executive, Stephen Rue, revealed in a snap press conference that three people died after hundreds of triple-zero calls were unable to be made across South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory yesterday.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas blasted the telco CEO last night, claiming that neither he nor the state's emergency services were given any information about the two deaths in the state.

"South Australian police didn't know. No one in SAS or ambulance service knew; my office didn't know. But then they conducted a press conference," said Malinauskas.

READ MORE: Pilot's body recovered from plane crash wreckage in NSW national park

"I have not witnessed such incompetence from an Australian corporation in respect to communications worse than this," he added.

Western Australia's Premier, Roger Cook, also spoke out against the telco, deeming the outage "completely unacceptable."

Authorities that run emergency services across South Australia and Western Australia have both said they had no idea about the emergency service breakdown until the telco's impromptu 5.45pm press conference.

In 2023, Optus was fined $12 million for a similar outage that cut 2000 people off from contacting 000.

Following this incident, they vowed it would never happen again.

Tech expert Trevor Long described this outage as a "more fundamental failure than the previous one" because, despite having network coverage, people were unable to contact emergency services.

"The Optus network overall was could make calls, take calls, call each other," he told Weekend Today.

"But the 000 component of the network didn't work."

READ MORE: Late-night shows address Jimmy Kimmel suspension with humour and solidarity

The outage was caused by a technical failure in a network update, which brought down emergency calls across South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia.

DOWNLOAD THE 9NEWS APP: Stay across all the latest in breaking news, sport, politics and the weather via our news app and get notifications sent straight to your smartphone. Available on the Apple App Store and Google Play.