Optus waited almost a day before it told the public that its triple-0 outage caused three deaths, also keeping the government in the dark while executives held several meetings and prepared talking points.

The telco's senior leadership appeared before a Senate inquiry on Monday, where chief executive Stephen Rue said he was "deeply sorry" about the outage but defended his own actions and resisted calls to resign.

It also presented a detailed timeline, revealing company staff first learned on Thursday night that hundreds of calls had been affected and that there had been deaths. Senior executives including Mr Rue knew early on Friday morning.

Despite this, the regulator, the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA) and Communications Minister Anika Wells were not told until th

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