Anger in Australia after telecom outage linked to deaths

The incident last week left hundreds of people across more than half of the country unable to call emergency services for 13 hours.

Optus - one of the country's two major providers - says at least three people died as a result, and its chief executive has apologised to their families and the public for the "completely unacceptable" failure.

The company is under fire for its delayed handling of the incident - the second such outage for the firm in two years - and the nation's communications regulator is investigating.

More than 600 calls to emergency services failed last Thursday, primarily coming from South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. At least two calls to triple-0 made from south-western New South Wales also did not connect.

However Optus waited 40 hours to inform the public about the incident, and also did not tell regulators until the issue was resolved - counter to standard practice, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) says.

In a press conference on Friday afternoon, Optus boss Stephen Rue blamed the outage on a technical fault identified during a network upgrade.

He said welfare checks conducted after services were restored confirmed three people had died, including a baby boy, though police have since said the network failure was "unlikely" to be a cause in that case. Authorities in WA also say they believe a fourth person died after their call to triple-0 failed.