CEO of Singtel-owned Optus says he has no plans to resign amid fiery probe into fatal outage

SYDNEY - Optus chief executive officer Stephen Rue said he has no plans to step down following September’s

fatal emergency call outage

as his leadership and the phone company came under fire in Australia’s Parliament.

“I firmly believe that another change of leader at this time is not what Optus needs or what our customers need,” Mr Rue said in his opening statement to a Senate inquiry into the network failure in Canberra on Nov 3. “The disruption and uncertainty could actually set back the transformation under way and create further risks.”

Optus, which is wholly owned by Singtel, has been in turmoil since the botched network upgrade prevented customers from calling emergency services and led to multiple deaths. Optus is Australia’s second-largest phone company and has been warned that it likely faces major financial penalties for the blunder. 

The telco’s reputation is in tatters because the network failure occurred less than two years after a similar incident impacted millions of Optus customers, including some emergency callers. Then CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned just a week after appearing at a similar parliamentary inquiry, where she was repeatedly asked whether she was considering her position. 

Mr Rue was then hired specifically to turn Optus around following the 2023 outage.

Under intense questioning by senators, he also defended his decision to inform Singtel about the September outage before the Australian government. BLOOMBERG