During Wednesday's Telstra outage, Liberal senator Sarah Henderson rang triple zero to test whether the emergency line was working. Angus Taylor, the shadow communications spokesperson, said she was "doing her job." The problem: making a triple zero call when there's no real emergency is against the law and can result in criminal charges The Guardian.

The outage itself had two separate problems. The main one knocked out Telstra's mobile network across the country. The second one stopped some customers from reaching triple zero at all. Telstra confirmed this secondary problem on Thursday and said they'd fixed 90% of it by then. They haven't said how many calls failed to get through news.com.au.

When Taylor was asked if Henderson had rung more than once, he didn't answer directly—he dodged the question. Labor politician Tim Ayres was more direct, calling her test calls "utterly irresponsible." Henderson said she was testing whether the system worked, not actually calling for help, but the law doesn't make much room for that distinction.

The same day, another Coalition senator made a bigger claim. Kerrynne Liddle posted on social media that an elderly person had died after failing to reach triple zero during the outage. But there's an important detail here: she said her office had "received a report" of the death. She wasn't saying she witnessed it or had direct knowledge—she was repeating something someone else had told her.

South Australia Police said they weren't aware of any death in the state connected to the outage. Police records show someone died in Mawson Lakes on July 8, but there's nothing in the official record linking that death to the triple-zero fault. When SA Police updated the public about the outage on Thursday morning, they said only a small number of Telstra customers had trouble reaching triple zero—much smaller than Liddle's post suggested.

Liddle's post stayed up on social media on Thursday afternoon. When journalists tried to get a response from her office, there was no reply. Taylor, instead of distancing himself from Liddle's unverified claim, simply moved past it—a choice that will probably attract more attention than Henderson's test calls.

Communications Minister Anika Wells said welfare checks were being done for people who couldn't reach triple zero. That's the right practical response. Wells also took aim at Taylor and Barnaby Joyce the day before for suggesting the outage was connected to China—a claim with nothing to back it up on the public record The Guardian. Labor politician Kristy McBain also criticised Henderson directly over the test calls, giving Labor two frontbenchers on the record attacking two different Coalition figures in 24 hours.

The outage wasn't a minor glitch. Telstra's boss cut short his holiday to handle it, and trains stopped running across the country because they rely on Telstra's mobile network Australian Financial Review.

What really matters is what comes next. The Australian Communications and Media Authority will review why this happened—specifically, how the outage created a second problem serious enough to block some emergency calls, and why it took a full day of political argument before anyone explained that clearly. Henderson's test calls and Liddle's claim are distractions from the actual question. One senator tested a system she probably shouldn't have. Another repeated a claim the police say they can't verify. And Taylor defended both without putting any real distance between himself and either situation. Whether that holds up when the regulator's findings come out is something else entirely.