‘Disgraceful failure’: Optus’ deadly lapse slammed by lawmakers

Calls for Optus’ boss to quit his role at the beleaguered telco reached deafening levels on Monday as new details from its fatal failure to connect more than 600 emergency services calls were revealed.

Australian politicians continued the demands for Stephen Rue’s resignation over the 13-hour network outage that led to three deaths across Western and South Australia when Triple-0 emergency calls went unanswered after a faulty systems upgrade by Optus. The telco operator was also accused of failing to act on public tip-offs about the network’s problems.

“People have a right to be livid about what’s happened here and right now our focus is about getting to the bottom of what went wrong,” Communications Minister Annika Wells said on Monday. “Optus will be held to account. It seems like Optus was told about this issue and didn’t act, which is not enough.

“There’ll be consequences for Optus and the broader telecommunications sector.”

On Monday afternoon, West Australian police commissioner Col Branch revealed one of the WA men who died during Optus’ Triple-0 outage made it to hospital, but the second did not after unanswered calls for help.

“It’s tragic. I’ve spent my whole career in law enforcement knowing that Triple-0 is the thing that gets help for people, and on this occasion, it just didn’t,” said Mr Branch.

The deaths of two Perth men, aged 74 and 49, and a 68-year-old woman in Adelaide are all linked to Optus’ failure to connect callers to emergency services.

The telco’s boss admitted up to five people had called the telco’s call centre to complain about not being able to connect to Triple-0 during September 18’s outage, but the warnings were not escalated for reasons under investigation.

The failures left WA police scrambling across door-to-door visits for callers on the afternoon of September 19 once it became aware of the prior day’s outages.

“Optus have serious questions to answer about their own processes and what went wrong,” said Ms Wells.

Mr Rue got the top job at Optus in November 2024 after working as chief executive of the National Broadband Network (NBN). In total the mobile phone and internet service provider connects more than 11 million Australians. In November 2023 the network provider suffered a 12-hour outage that disrupted access to critical internet and mobile services.

Politicians demand Optus boss quits

Other politicians, including shadow communications minister Melissa McIntosh, said Mr Rue should quit his job after after he fielded media questions on Friday only to put out a further statement on Sunday.

Ms McIntosh also suggested that instead of the Australian Communications and Media Authority handling the investigation, “something stronger” like an independent inquiry was needed.

“It’s an absolute disgraceful failure by Optus on every single account,” Ms McIntosh told the 2GB Mornings radio show. “I think most right-minded Australians are calling for his (Mr Rue’s) head today. Australians have a lot of questions. I don’t think those questions are being answered right now.”

The Prime Minister Anthony Albanese added to the pressure on Mr Rue to quit on Monday by agreeing that the telco boss is on thin ground. “I’d be surprised if that wasn’t occurring,” the Prime Minister told ABC News Breakfast when asked if he thought the company’s chief executive should consider his position.

Tim Wilson, Shadow Minister for Small Business, also told Nine Entertainment’s he cannot see how Mr Rue survives as Optus boss.

“It’s disgraceful and should never have happened, but how the board can stand by and not think there should be accountability is beyond me.”

Mr Wilson also backed the Liberal Party’s chorus for an inquiry independent of ACMA and suggested an independent senate inquiry as a suitable recourse.

Ms McIntosh also suggested critical calls related to emergencies should not be linked to offshore call centres in terms of operational processes, with relatively small fines an insufficient deterrent to Singtel-owned telco Optus.

“We’re approaching bushfire season,” said Ms McIntosh. “Every single Australian should ... have that confidence if they need to call Triple-0, that they’re going to get through.”

Other politicians on both sides of Canberra weighed in on the failings on Monday, attacking Optus for its failure to learn from a similar outage in 2023 that led to a $12 million fine from ACMA.

Greens Senator for South Australia, Sarah Hanson-Young attacked Optus for putting profits before its obligation to ensure the safety of Australians as a provider of critical communications infrastructure.

“How many more strikes does Optus need,” Senator Hanson-Young said. “The company clearly can’t be trusted to do the right thing on its own. We don’t need another review for the Minister to take immediate action, she has the power to act and can intervene today.

“This is a matter of life and death and at the end of the day, responsibility sits with the Government to ensure that this most essential service is delivered to Australians.”

Communications regulator responds

On Monday, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said it was “deeply concerned” by the failures and that it has opened an investigation into the failing with the results to be made public on its conclusion.

The regulator suggested Optus has likely broken the law in its failing to connect the calls and to undertake a welfare check on all callers who it didn’t connect to emergency services.

ACMA said it will also investigate Optus’ failure to “communicate information about the outage to customers and the public, including putting relevant and up-to-date information on its website and using apps, email, SMS, other media or call centres to keep the public informed.”

The regulator will also demand to know why Telstra ,as the emergency call back-up, was not immediately notified and why it failed to communicate the problem to other stakeholders including the relevant ministerial portfolio department, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman and the National Emergency Management Agency.

Both the WA and SA governments have expressed concern they were not told of the full extent — and consequences — of the outage until about the same time as a public media statement on Friday night.

South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas said it was a “pretty astonishing failure of appropriate disclosure from a company of this size and strength”.

“No one in our emergency services were told that the deaths occurred. No one knew anything about it. Not in the South Australian ambulance. Not in the South Australian police,” he told Sky News on Monday.

“And what makes that worse . . . is that, to the best of our knowledge, it was a South Australian Ambulance Service that first alerted us to the Optus failure.”

ACMA Chair Nerida O’Loughlin also expressed disappointment Optus did not inform the authority and other regulators about the problem until it was fixed.

Speaking at a press conference with Ms Wells, Ms O’Loughlin said the investigation would also consider how Optus operates in emergencies and “whether there are systems and processes in place to alert Optus to when things are going wrong, because we’re seeing this big gap between when the outage actually occurred and when people were notified.”