Family of suspected WA Optus outage victim say they’re still in the dark

Christopher Oliver was sleeping at a friend’s house in mid-September when they noticed he had stopped breathing.

No one knows how long it had been, whether he had asked for help or what time he had died.

“They can’t say whether or not he used his phone, or how long it was between the friends noticing that he wasn’t asleep as they thought that he was, or how long it was before they rang an ambulance,” his sister Sarah said. “I don’t have a timeline.”

At the same time Oliver was experiencing a medical episode, Optus was experiencing a triple-zero outage that was later linked to the deaths of three people in South Australia and Western Australia.

When word came through about her brother’s death, Sarah began the difficult grieving process.

“I had a couple of days where I was just floating and thinking, ‘OK, he’s gone’,” she said.

Initially, the outage was linked to the death of a 74-year-old Willetton man, and a 75-year-old woman and newborn boy in South Australia, however the newborn’s death was later deemed to be unrelated to the network failure.

But then, on the weekend of September 20, more news came through. It was announced another person had died in WA after further investigation – a 49-year-old man from the Perth suburb of Kensington.

Oliver was 49. He lived in Kensington.

“I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute’,” Sarah said.

“I contacted our family members again, and they said, ‘Yeah, that’s him’.”

A beloved brother

Sarah, who has requested this masthead not publish her last name, remembers her older brother as “cool”.

“He was artistic, and he liked skateboarding, he liked break-dancing and rap music that I didn’t understand at the time,” she said.

“I’ve got all these notebooks of artwork from when he was little. [As he got older] he moved more into graffiti and that sort of thing.”

Oliver had recently celebrated his 49th birthday, and Sarah remembers speaking to him on the day of his death.

The rest of the day remains a mystery to her, and it is the hours after speaking with him she has had to piece together through the help of family and friends instead of through information provided from authorities.

“Initial questions [about the outage] were met with one-word answers, and about things being unconfirmed and things being ongoing,” Sarah said.

She said authorities were hesitant to explicitly link her brother’s death to the outage, but the suggestion there may have been some impact left her and her family with more questions than answers about her brother’s final moments.

“We were asking, ‘Does that mean that he tried to contact [someone]?’. Because I know he’s with Optus, so I was asking did that mean he was aware [of what was happening]?” Sarah said.

“Did he not just die in his sleep? Was that just something I was told, because everyone wants to hear that, right?

“It became, ‘Am I being appeased, or am I just being paranoid?’”

Sarah said as the family slowly became aware of more details, it was even more confronting.

“As we found out more, mum couldn’t sleep. [She pictured] him calling, and then it not working,” she said.

Sarah said contact with police did eventually improve following media inquiries, and she had developed some understanding it was likely her brother’s death was indeed connected with the Optus outage.

However, she said there was still a reluctance by authorities to explicitly make the connection.

“We’ve been told by police that if he had been able to get through ... nothing would have changed,” she said.

She said she hoped police had been more communicative with the other families who had lost loved ones during the outage.

A WA Police spokesperson said the case is with the coroner.

“The circumstances surrounding the death of a 49-year-old Kensington man remain under investigation by Coronial Investigations Squad. A report is being prepared for the coroner,” she said.

“Officers from the WA Police Force have maintained regular contact with the senior next of kin throughout the course of the investigation, and the nature of that communication is confidential.”

An Optus spokesperson said the company extended its deepest sympathies to the family and friends of those who sought help and who were unable to immediately reach emergency services on September 18.

“We apologise to them and to all those affected by this outage,” they said.

“Following 18 September, Optus reached out to WA and SA Police to convey an offer for a private meeting with CEO Stephen Rue to impacted families. ”

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