JENI O’DOWD: Optus has been caught asleep at the wheel, CEO Stephen Rue’s apology does not cut it

It’s hard to see how Stephen Rue can survive as CEO of Optus. But even if he steps down, the latest disaster has revealed something more corrosive than one man’s misjudgment: a corporate culture that prioritises spin over substance.

Rue’s apology after last week’s triple-0 catastrophe could have been copied straight out of the corporate crisis manual: “completely unacceptable, we’ll investigate, we’re sorry.”

The words are so overused that they may as well come on a template, ready to roll out whenever a company is caught asleep at the wheel.

That might cut it for a footballer caught drunk, or a celebrity fumbling through an “offensive tweet” comeback.

But this was no nightclub scuffle. At least three Australians are dead. Hundreds of desperate calls for help never reached emergency services. And yet Optus still reached for the same limp phrasing: sorry, investigate, move on.

This is not the first time

The outage began during a routine firewall update about 12.30am last Thursday. By dawn, parts of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were effectively cut off from emergency services. Optus only realised the scale of the collapse when a customer called to complain. In a country where triple-0 is a lifeline, this was a lethal failure.

Rue finally fronted up on Friday night, looking rattled, earning at least $5 million a year but offering nothing beyond well-worn lines.

“I am so sorry for your loss. What has happened is completely unacceptable. We have let you down,” he said. That must be the understatement of the year. In an industry making billions, the one thing Australians should never doubt is whether an emergency call will connect.

But Rue did what CEOs always do: apologised and announced an “independent review”. What he didn’t do was give details. How many calls failed? When did the systems first go down? What had already been fixed?

He didn’t freeze executive bonuses, stand anyone aside or commit to a timeline for public reporting. And he certainly didn’t centre the victims by offering real, tangible support to families who had lost loved ones.

This is the pattern of any corporate crisis: four neat steps. Express shock. Say it’s unacceptable. Announce an investigation. Promise to learn lessons. Job done.

It’s clean, bloodless and designed to shrink the outrage cycle. Months later, when the “independent review” is released, the CEO has stepped down, and the public has moved on. The company has settled with regulators, and the surviving executives can still collect their annual bonuses.

Rue is no stranger to corporate survival. I knew him at News Corp, where he rose to the position of CFO.

Back then, he was feared, relentless and thrived in a place that chews up anyone who can’t keep pace. Today, he cuts a very different figure: pale, hollow-eyed and visibly shaken, a far cry from the confident man I remember dressing down editors over dwindling ad revenue as the internet began to eat into print.

Inside Optus, no doubt heads will roll. But the bigger problem isn’t one leader. It’s an industry that treats trust as a liability rather than a responsibility.

Like most people, I was stunned by how Optus again reached this position. In 2023, the company managed to knock out internet and phone services for more than 10 million Australians in a nationwide blackout that dragged on for hours.

Emergency calls failed then as well. A Senate inquiry grilled executives, customers fumed, businesses lost money and Optus eventually copped a $12 million fine for breaching rules around access to triple-0.

Fast-forward to 2025, and here we are: different outage, same script, same sorry.

And Optus isn’t alone. Over the weekend, the Commonwealth Bank managed its own, albeit minor, meltdown: routine maintenance went wrong, freezing customer accounts, blocking payments and shutting down the app. The official line? Another bland apology: “We apologise for the disruption and appreciate your patience.”

Australians pay through the nose for phones and bank loans. In return, we should expect systems that don’t collapse when they matter most, leaders who front up with clarity and companies that treat our trust as something more than a PR problem.

What we don’t need is another corporate masterclass in regret.