Optus 'deeply sorry' for deadly outage

CEO tells senators about immediate changes made by the telco.

"What happened on 18 September is unacceptable."

Those were the words of Optus CEO Stephen Rue when he addressed the Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications in Canberra on 3 November, as part of a public hearing on the Triple Zero service outage in September that caused four deaths.

During the hearing, Rue provided an explanation whilst apologising on behalf of the Singtel-owned telco that he has been leading since November 2024.

"The outage on 18 September was not a complex system failure, but it was a unique circumstance where Triple Zero was down while other calls continued normally," Rue noted.

"The initial mistake – a human error – occurred when the wrong process plan was selected for a routine firewall upgrade. The selected plan did not divert traffic before locking equipment inside the exchange that routes Triple Zero calls."

He pointed out that the error was not detected due to control steps not being followed at the time whilst alarms were not acted on either.

The technical failure happened during an Optus network upgrade. As a result, a number of Triple Zero (Australia's emergency number) calls in South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia failed. This led to the death of four people.

"As the CEO, I am accountable for Optus' failings, and I am deeply sorry. We are all deeply sorry," Rue said when he delivered his opening statement.

"The tragic deaths of people during this outage will stay with us as individuals and as a company as we investigate the incident and build on our response whilst progressing a sweeping transformation of Optus."

According to the Optus boss, the telco has made changes in response to the issues behind the outage. The immediate measures include round-the-clock state-by-state monitoring of Triple Zero call volumes and failure rates; a mandatory escalation process for any customer reports of issues; daily manual test calls in every state and territory; the formation of a dedicated Critical Services Team; and requiring explicit confirmation that emergency call routing is functioning both before and after network changes.

Optus is also adding around 300 people to its Australian call centres that focus on Triple Zero and vulnerable customers.

"No telecommunications company can ever promise to stop all outages or disruptions; indeed, we have had outages since September 18," Rue stated. "Telcos must make sure their own networks are reliable. That's on each of us.

"But we must also ensure that back-up systems, like camp-on (a critical mobile network function that allows a mobile phone to connect to the Triple Zero emergency call service using another carrier's network when the user’s own network is unavailable), also work for Australians."

He went on to assure that Optus is fully cooperating with the service outage inquiry and the Australian Communications and Media Authority's investigation.