Australia's Optus vows to cooperate with probes amid outrage over emergency call services outage
View of an Optus shop in Sydney, Australia on Nov 8, 2023. (File photo: REUTERS/Kirsty Needham)
Optus, Australia's number two telecom carrier, said on Saturday (Sep 20) 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 two other fatalities were men aged 74 and 49, police in Western Australia said.
Optus CEO Stephen Rue said in a statement late on Saturday that he was "deeply saddened" at news of the latest death, the 49-year-old. Police said the man's body was found during welfare checks prompted by the glitch.
Earlier on Saturday, 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 Thursday occurred during a firewall upgrade for the network, the company said.
Around 600 customers in two states and Australia's Northern Territory were potentially affected. Optus has completed welfare checks on those people, Rue said. In cases where no contact was made, the checks have been handed off to the police, he added.
The Australian government promised on Friday to investigate what it called a "completely unacceptable" failure by the company, which is owned by Singapore Telecommunications.
Rue said on Friday that 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 (US$8 million) by regulators for failing to provide emergency call services to thousands during a nationwide outage in 2023.
Optus also suffered a cyberattack in 2022 that affected the data of around 9.5 million Australians and a network-wide outage in 2023, which prompted the resignation of then-CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin. Rue took the reins in November 2024.
