CANBERRA - Australia's Minister for Communications said on Monday that the telecommunications company Optus will face significant consequences for an outage that affected emergency calls and has been linked to three deaths.

Anika Wells said at a press conference on Monday morning that Optus, Australia's second-largest telecommunications company, will be "held accountable" for the outage, which occurred on Thursday and was disclosed by the company on Friday.

Optus Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Stephen Rue said at a snap press conference on Friday night that three people died after the outage resulted in the failure of more than 600 calls to Australia's emergency number, triple-0, over 13 hours on Thursday.

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Wells said on Monday that Optus, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singaporean conglomerate Singtel, has "no excuses" for the outage.

"They have perpetuated a failure upon the Australian people with what has happened here. They can expect to suffer significant consequences as a result," she said.

She said that the government was not notified about the extent of the outage until Friday.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) confirmed in a statement on Monday that it has started an investigation into the outage.

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The ACMA in November fined Optus 12 million Australian dollars ($7.9 million) for a similar triple-0 outage that occurred in November 2023.