Samsung user loses life after Galaxy phone fails to reach emergency hotline

An Australian citizen recently lost their life after being unable to call 000, Australia’s national emergency service line, on their old Samsung phone. The deceased was a customer of Lebara, a carrier that’s part of Australia’s TPG Telecom Limited and operates on Vodafone’s network in the region, and was unable to call Triple Zero despite having an active service.

TPG informed the ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) that the incident occurred on November 13 and that no network outage was detected at the time. According to The Guardian, TPG claimed the incident occurred because the victim’s call failed to connect, as they were using one of the 70-plus Samsung handsets deemed incompatible for dialing the emergency number.

The mishap follows a broader service outage of another major Australian telco, Optus, back in September that prevented several consumers from reaching triple zero and was reportedly linked to at least three fatalities, including that of an infant. The incident prompted a parliamentary inquiry, after which three of the largest Aussie telcos joined forces to list 71 unsupported Samsung models. The carriers, including Telstra, Optus, and TPG, had also urged consumers to update their handsets by November 7 or risk being blocked on their networks.

At the root of the issue, as also confirmed by Samsung, is outdated software. According to the carriers, the obsolete software prevents the handset from switching to another carrier’s network to reach emergency service when its own network is unavailable.

As explained by Telstra last month, Samsung handsets are designed to fall back to Vodafone’s 3G network when calling triple zero when its own or Optus’ networks are unavailable. Since Vodafone has already shuttered its 3G network in the region, these calls fail to go through.

Telstra shared a list of 60 Samsung models that had to be updated to rectify the issue. It also identified the following 11 affected handsets that could not be fixed by a software update and had to be replaced:

Despite these clarifications, what’s concerning is that the victim’s phone reportedly had network access at the time they attempted to call 000.

The Guardian reported that Samsung was working with the operators to rectify the issue. Meanwhile, the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) is independently reviewing whether any of its recently enforced Triple Zero testing rules — which require carriers to test every supported mobile handset model every six months for potential connectivity issues — have been breached.