Optus outage affects South Australia mental health triage services

The South Australian premier has described the Optus outage as “the single biggest telecommunications outage” seen in Australia and says he believes most governments are affected in some form. 

Peter Malinauskas says the State Emergency Centre has been stood up by SA Police and had held two meetings to consider responses to the crisis.

The premier said SA Health had been most affected, but there had been no clinical implications due to the outage.

Of most concern is the mental health triage service, which has had a “challenge” with people trying to call in.

All emergency services and response are operating “as we reasonably expect them to” while some internal communications have been affected but are being “worked through”, the premier said.

“Also of course, the triple-0 service, which is just as important for health actions, is operating as we would expect, notwithstanding the fact that landline-based customers of Optus do have a challenge in terms of using triple-0 service,” Mr Malinauskas said.

“If I have to characterise it in a simple way in terms of the implications for SA Health, it is a substantial inconvenience but not one that has clinical implications on the ability of SA Health to look after its patients.”

Patients awaiting test results may face delays but the premier said those with critical needs would be prioritised and seen to via alternative means.

Deputy Police Commissioner Linda Williams said Optus customers relying on Alert SA for bushfire information need to seek alternative ways to receive emergency information.

“We encourage people who would normally rely on Optus services as their main source of information to find alternate [ways] prior to that so they are aware if they are going to be in extreme fire danger areas so they can activate their necessary precautionary plans,” she said.

Mr Malinauskas has also criticised Optus, saying it was disappointing “there hasn’t been a great degree of communication coming out of Optus up until this point”.

He said the state government is actively communicating with another company about switching over critical services, “particularly given we don’t know how long this will last for”.

“Optus need to respond swiftly, communicate effectively with everybody about exactly what is going on here,” he said.

Call centres for SA Water and Service SA, which manages licensing and registration matters, were down and people were asked to use websites where possible or visit Service SA locations.

Public transport services had not been impacted.