Eight-week-old baby dies during Optus triple-0 blackout as investigation unfolds

An eight-week-old Adelaide infant died during Optus' 13-hour triple-zero outage, a development that has added a fatal dimension to a crisis auditors say affected emergency services across several Australian states. Police said the death is unlikely to be connected to the outage because the grandmother at the Mulga Street home in Gawler West immediately used another phone to call Triple-0 after the initial attempt failed. The family announced the infant, Ryan Seeby, was born July 21 and died on September 18, sharing grief-filled posts on social media.

The outage, which disrupted emergency calls on Thursday, also involved Western Australia and the Northern Territory, according to authorities. Optus has confirmed a network upgrade and a botched firewall update that prevented a number of calls from connecting. The company said approximately 600 customers were potentially affected, with a portion of those calls not going through during the incident.

In Adelaide, the tragedy reverberates alongside other fatalities linked to the outage. Police described the Queenstown death of a 68-year-old woman as more complex, with investigators continuing to determine how the incident may have interacted with the service disruption. Meanwhile, authorities have linked the outage to the deaths of two men in Perth: a 74-year-old from Willetton and a 49-year-old from Kensington. Optus chief executive Stephen Rue acknowledged the outage, noting the firewall failure affected emergency calls and that an investigation remains ongoing.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas condemned Optus’ handling of the incident, accusing the company of mismanaging communications and of releasing statements before notifying state authorities that deaths had occurred. He labeled the company’s conduct reprehensible and signaled potential political and legal scrutiny in the days ahead. After the outage, legal adviser Sam Macedone suggested Optus could face civil claims for compensation if it can be shown the deaths were directly caused by the inability to reach triple zero and the company breached its duty of care.

The episode also revived scrutiny of Optus’ regulatory history, including a 2023 incident in which the telco was fined more than $12 million for breaching emergency-call rules during a separate outage that affected thousands of customers and welfare checks on hundreds more. In a separate account of the outage’s impact, an Adelaide woman described trying to reach 000 multiple times for her husband, who later died; she was eventually able to unlock his phone using his thumbprint after discovering it remained connected to another provider and received a welfare call from Optus the following day. The case underscored the human stakes of the outage and the pressure on Optus to restore trust as investigators continue to piece together a timeline of events and the outages’ real-world consequences.