Australia’s Optus vows to cooperate with probes amid outrage over emergency call services outage

Optus, Australia’s No. 2 telecom carrier, said on Sept 20 that it would cooperate with official investigations after

four people died following a technical failure that disrupted emergency call services

for 13 hours.

Amid a growing outcry, two of the dead were identified as an eight-week-old boy and a 68-year-old woman, police in South Australia said. The other two fatalities were men aged 49 and 74, police in Western Australia said.

Optus chief executive officer Stephen Rue said in a statement late on Sept 20 that he was “deeply saddened” at news of the latest death, that of the 49-year-old.

Police said the man’s body was found during welfare checks prompted by the glitch.

Earlier on Sept 20, Mr Rue, at his second press conference on the incident in two days, repeated apologies and said Optus would carry out an independent review of the incident.

“I promise that we will fully cooperate with any and all investigations in relation to this,” he said in Sydney.

The 13-hour glitch on Sept 18 occurred during a firewall upgrade for the network, the company said.

Around 600 customers in the two states and in Australia’s Northern Territory were potentially affected.

Optus has completed welfare checks on those people, Mr Rue said. In cases where no contact was made, the checks have been handed off to the police, he added.

The Australian government on Sept 19 promised to investigate what it called a “completely unacceptable” failure by the company, which is owned by Singtel.

Mr Rue on Sept 19 said Optus had fixed the fault, was conducting a thorough investigation and would make the results public.

The incident comes less than a year after Optus was fined A$12 million (S$10.15 million) by regulators for failing to provide emergency call services to thousands during a nationwide outage in 2023. That outage prompted the resignation of then chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin. Mr Rue took the reins in November 2024.

Optus also suffered a cyber attack in 2022 that affected the data of around 9.5 million Australians. REUTERS