Angus Taylor says Sarah Henderson was "doing her job" when she rang triple zero to test whether the emergency line was working during Wednesday's nationwide Telstra outage. The shadow communications spokesman made the comment defending the Victorian Liberal senator's calls, which came as the network buckled and, separately, as a secondary fault left some customers unable to reach emergency services at all The Guardian.

Telstra confirmed on Thursday that a subset of customers struggled to connect to triple zero because of that secondary issue, distinct from the mobile outage itself, and said the fault's occurrence had been cut by 90% by Thursday. The carrier has not detailed how many calls failed to connect or over what window, information that will presumably feature in the review the Australian Communications and Media Authority has now confirmed it will conduct.

Henderson's calls sit awkwardly against the law. Placing a call to triple zero absent a genuine emergency can attract criminal penalties, a point Taylor did not engage with when pressed on whether the senator had rung more than once. He deflected rather than answered. Labor's Tim Ayres was blunter, calling the calls "utterly irresponsible" — the kind of description that tends to stick regardless of the underlying intent, which by Henderson's own framing was to test system integrity, not to summon help.

Taylor was similarly dismissive of a separate and more serious claim from South Australian Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle, who posted on social media on Wednesday night that an elderly person had died after being unable to get through to triple zero during what she described as a life-or-death emergency. Liddle's post said her office had "received a report" of the death — a secondhand account, not a claim of firsthand knowledge, a distinction that matters given what has (and hasn't) been substantiated since news.com.au.

South Australia Police said on social media they were not aware of any death in the state connected to the outage. SA Police's own public record shows a death at Mawson Lakes on 8 July, with a report being prepared for the coroner, but nothing in the force's published material links that death to the triple-zero fault. The force's Thursday-morning outage update, issued at 8.28am, relayed Telstra's advice that only a small number of calls from its customers to triple zero were failing to connect — hardly the picture Liddle's post conjured.

The post was still live on Thursday afternoon. Guardian Australia said it made several attempts to reach Liddle's office for comment and got nothing back. Taylor, for his part, waved away the concern rather than distancing the Coalition from an unverified claim of a death — a call that will likely draw more scrutiny than the one he made about Henderson.

Communications Minister Anika Wells said welfare checks were under way for people who couldn't get through to triple zero during the outage, which is the appropriate operational response regardless of how the political argument shakes out. Wells had already had a crack at the Coalition a day earlier, mocking Taylor and Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce for suggesting a link between the outage and China — a theory that, on the public record so far, has nothing under it The Guardian. Labor's Kristy McBain also went after Henderson directly over the triple-zero test calls, putting two Labor frontbenchers on record criticising two different Coalition figures within 24 hours.

The outage itself was no small technical hiccup. Telstra's chief executive cut short a holiday to manage the response, and the disruption was serious enough to halt trains, underlining how much day-to-day infrastructure now leans on a single carrier's mobile network staying up Australian Financial Review.

None of this changes the substantive question the ACMA review will need to answer: how a national outage produced a secondary fault serious enough to stop some triple-zero calls connecting, and why that took a day of political noise to surface clearly. The Henderson and Liddle episodes are, in a sense, distractions from that — one senator arguably tested a system she shouldn't have, another passed on a claim that the relevant police force says it can't verify, and the Coalition's most senior communications voice defended both without much daylight between them. Whether that holds up once the ACMA reports is a different question from whether it was smart politics in the meantime.