WA Police says it took Optus more than nine hours to tell them about a fault preventing Triple Zero calls from connecting, and that the telco initially downplayed the situation as quote a "minor" network outage.

A 13-hour outage late last week caused hundreds of triple-zero calls in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory to fail, which has been linked to several deaths. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says there needs to be a full investigation but wouldn't be drawn on whether the company's head should resign.

And in an official statement, Optus CEO Stephen Rue has apologised for everyone impacted and says the company is: "implementing a new compulsory escalation process following any customer reports of Triple Zero failures through our customer call centre"

• Guest: Peter Malinauskas, Premier of South Australia
• Producer: Grace Stranger