Optus CEO Pledges to Make Changes After Emergency Call Failure

(Bloomberg) -- Australian phone company Optus will implement any recommendations from an independent review, Chief Executive Officer Stephen Rue said, after an emergency call outage that resulted in at least two deaths.

The board is preparing to appoint an outside expert to lead the review, he told reporters Sunday in Sydney. It will come alongside a government investigation, after officials indicated the Australian Communications and Media Authority will conduct its own probe into the outage. 

“We will make public the facts,” Rue said at a televised news conference. “We will get recommendations of what to do and I’m determined that we will implement those.”

The move comes as politicians and commentators express outrage over a technical failure that disrupted emergency calls, with attention particularly being paid to why it took Optus more than a day to disclose the problem.  

Federal and state politicians have asked why the nation’s second-biggest phone company didn’t heed the lessons of a nationwide outage in November 2023 that affected millions of customers — including some who were unable to make emergency calls. 

The ACMA’s investigation of the 2023 failure led to an A$12 million ($8 million) fine from ACMA and ultimately cost then-CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin her job.

Rue said one of the tasks of the internal review will be to look at the effectiveness of the changes Optus put in place after the 2023 outage.

Firewall Upgrade

The recent call failures led to the deaths of a 68-year-old woman in South Australia and a 74-year-old man in Western Australia, according to the police. 

Local police officers have also referred the death of another person in Western Australia to the coroner to determine whether that was due to the outage. However, the failure is unlikely to have contributed to the death of an eight-week-old boy that had been initially linked to the issues, South Australia Police said Sunday.

Optus, the Australian unit of Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., has begun monitoring so-called triple zero call volumes and failure rates state-by-state, 24 hours a day, Rue said. It has also halted any network system changes. The suspension will remain in place until Optus has a clearer understanding of what has occurred and has introduced more monitoring, testing and compliance steps in the process, he said.

The company continues to investigate why a network upgrade early on Sept. 18 crashed the triple zero service, and why it took 13 hours before it became aware of the failure, Rue said.

The emergency calling outage was caused by processes not being followed during a firewall upgrade, Rue said. The company is speaking with individuals involved and steps are being taken to ensure there is no repeat.

He disclosed that as many as five calls were made to the Optus contact center raising concerns about the Triple Zero service early on Sept. 18 but these weren’t passed on internally.

“This is clearly not good enough and we are implementing a compulsory escalation process following any customer reports of triple zero outages,” he said.

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