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Communications Minister Anika Wells says there is a “very serious lack of confidence” in Optus to deliver Triple Zero services to Australians, after its fatal outage in which three people died.
Wells met in Sydney on Tuesday morning with Optus chief executive Stephen Rue and his boss, Singtel chief Yuen Kuan Moon, who flew in from Singapore. Amid mounting political pressure Wells said she sought assurances from both Optus and Singtel that they would prioritise restoring confidence in the Triple Zero system.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue leaves his house on Tuesday morning. Picture Nine NewsCredit: Nine News
“I think the CEO of Optus has a lot of work to do, given these two outages have happened in short succession and has given rise to a very serious lack of confidence in both Optus and their ability to deliver Triple Zero services to Australians when they need it most,” Wells told reporters after the meeting.
“The CEO of Optus now needs to work with their parent company, Singtel, on the systems and holistic change required within their own company to give that confidence back to Australians.”
Wells said she had asked Singtel to appoint an external accountability partner to “make sure that Australians can take advice not just from Optus themselves but from an independent and external party that the systems in place will serve Australians when they needed the most.”
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Singtel chief executive Yuen Kuan Moon gave his own press conference directly after Wells and refused to give a straight “yes” or “no” answer when asked if Rue had his full backing.
“We brought in Stephen 11 months ago to transform Optus, to really address the issues that we have had since 2022-23,” he said.
“It is very early days, it takes time to transform a company … The 18 September incident is due to a people issue and it takes time to transform and change the people. He is here to provide the solution.”
Asked whether the fatal outage was related to underfunding in the carrier’s Triple Zero system, Optus chairman John Arthur said: “We recruited Stephen specifically to fix the issues at Optus. He has been in the job 11 months, the board is satisfied that he is making progress, but it is a work in progress.”
It comes amid a period of mounting crisis for Australia’s second-largest telco, which is bracing for a wave of customer losses and long-lasting reputational damage after the Triple Zero failure on September 18, and a further incident in NSW this past weekend. Industry insiders have warned the telco’s credibility has been shredded and its governance structures exposed, and the outage is now the subject of multiple investigations.
Communications Minister Anika Wells met with the chief executives of Optus and Singtel today.Credit: Kate Geraghty
Rue has blamed human error by staff at home and abroad for the catastrophic Triple Zero failure that cost at least three lives.
The executive last week told journalists that emergency calls were not diverted away from the core part of the network in what he described as a “process breakdown”. He said the network engineers were based across Australia and Chennai, India.
“The first step in the process was not followed,” Rue said.
“We have successfully completed similar upgrades in the past, and it should be reiterated that the issue occurred because this time there was a deviation from established processes.”
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Optus has launched its own independent review of the outage, last week appointing corporate veteran Kerry Schott, a former Deutsche Bank managing director, to report on the incident by the end of the year.
“The independent review will investigate the series of events that took place here and determine why all Triple Zero calls could not divert correctly,” Rue said.
This is not Optus’ first disaster. In November 2023, a nationwide outage left more than 2000 Australians unable to reach emergency services. Optus was fined $12 million the following year.
Rue was formerly the head of NBN Co, and joined Optus in November 2024, promising to stabilise the company and rebuild customer trust.
More to come
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