148 triple-0 calls unable to be transferred during outage
Telstra's CEO has today apologised to the family of a Melburnian who died after calls for help weren't immediately transferred to paramedics. The telco says it's investigating why its operators were unable to connect callers to triple-zero workers early this morning. The ambulance union says the system breakdown caused complete chaos.
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TVTranscript
00:00 They're the first responders in emergencies. But in the early hours of this morning, the
00:07 system transferring triple zero calls to emergency service workers failed.
00:11 They said it was chaos and they did everything they could. They had to call back a lot of
00:15 patients who hadn't been able to get through.
00:18 When the system is functioning correctly, callers to emergency services are transferred
00:23 by national Telstra call takers to the appropriate service in their state. But from 3.30 to 5.30
00:29 o'clock this morning, Telstra call takers were forced to email contact details of 148
00:36 calls to emergency services. Other calls were transferred manually, with a total of 494
00:43 calls affected.
00:44 It would have been stressful for the Telstra operators who are trying to capture information
00:51 and ask questions of the caller who's ringing for the emergency. They're not trained to
00:56 know what to ask.
00:57 The ambulance union says one man in Victoria had a cardiac arrest and died.
01:02 There was a delay in the dispatch and that's led to quite a significant delay in the person
01:06 getting care. Now whether that's a factor in the person's survival or not, we can never
01:10 know.
01:11 Telstra has promised a forensic investigation, saying it will review its processes.
01:16 Can I just first offer my deepest apology to the family of that person and in fact to
01:23 anyone who was impacted.
01:27 Multiple states, including Victoria, were affected by this morning's outage. But Telstra
01:32 is not saying where else it caused problems. The state and federal governments say they'll
01:37 be seeking answers.
01:38 The Australian Communications and Media Authority is undertaking an initial assessment of Telstra's
01:44 compliance with its regulatory obligations.
01:47 Telstra says the service has been stable since 5am.
01:50 No call should wait. Every call is an emergency.
01:53 [BLANK_AUDIO]