SINGAPORE – Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has expressed his condolences over the deaths of three people linked to an outage on Australian telco Optus, which is wholly owned by Singtel.

Emergency calls made through Optus’ network

were disrupted for 13 or so hours on Sept 18

In an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC released on Oct 6, PM Wong said: “First of all, I can fully understand the anger, frustration and outrage by what happened.

“And I would like to extend my condolences to everyone who has been impacted by the outage, especially the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives.”

The Sept 18 outage affected around 600 emergency callers with three people, all elderly, found dead from households that made calls.

Two of them were in Perth, and the other, in Adelaide.

A fourth death, that of a eight-week old boy from an Adelaide suburb, was initially linked to the outage, but the link was subsequently deemed as unlikely as his grandmother had immediately used another mobile phone to reach emergency services.