An Australian senator has claimed that an elderly person died during a nationwide Telstra outage after apparently being unable to connect to the Triple Zero emergency line, though authorities say they have no knowledge of any such death. The claim matters because the outage, caused by a technical fault at the telco's Sydney and Melbourne data centres, disrupted calls, mobile data and electronic payments for millions of customers and affected access to emergency services.

South Australian Liberal Senator Kerrynne Liddle said her office had received a report of a "tragic death" following a failure to connect to Triple Zero during a life-or-death emergency, adding that no Australian should be unable to reach the service when their life depends on it. Telstra said 300 Triple Zero calls were affected and that it had been unable to reach 79 people who called back, while also warning of a scam call issue emerging after the disruption. However, South Australia Police said they were not aware of any death linked to the outage, and Communications Minister Anika Wells said she had not been notified by Telstra of a death.