WA Police were first notified about an Optus outage affecting triple-zero calls almost 24 hours after it occurred when the telco requested welfare checks on 26 failed emergency calls just after 9pm on Thursday evening. The full extent of the catastrophic network failure – which has left two West Australians dead – was not realised until the following afternoon, when WA Police was notified of another 123 unsuccessful calls in a public media release. WA Police Commander Jodie Pearson. Credit: 9News PerthCommander Jodie Pearson said it was via this release that WA Police learnt a West Australian person was among those who died after not being able to contact emergency services. “The WA Police Force were not advised of these deaths or the scale of the outage prior to this public media release,” Pearson said on Sunday afternoon.