(Bloomberg) — Optus, the Australian unit of Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., is facing multiple investigations and potential penalties after a technical failure that disrupted emergency calls and resulted in three deaths.
The outage occurred during a network upgrade Thursday and impacted the so-called Triple Zero calls in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Follow-up checks revealed that three people died in households that had tried unsuccessfully to make emergency calls, the company said late Friday when it disclosed the event.
Communications Minister Anika Wells told a new conference Saturday that Optus must explain why it failed to immediately notify emergency services and other relevant agencies. She added that regulators and state governments will conduct multiple investigations.
“Optus has let Australians down when they needed them the most,” she said. “This isn’t good enough. We will act in the best interests of all Australians to keep failures like this from happening again.”
Optus was fined A$12 million ($8 million) after a national outage in November 2023 that affected millions of customers, including some who couldn’t make an emergency call.
This week’s fatalities included the an eight-week-old infant and a 68-year-old woman in South Australia, police said in a statement. The third death was a 74-year-old man in Western Australia, media reported citing state Health Infrastructure Minister John Carey
“I want to offer a sincere apology to all customers who could not connect to emergency services when they needed them most, and I offer my most sincere and heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the people who passed away,” Optus Chief Executive Officer Stephen Rue said in a statement.
“What has happened is completely unacceptable. We have let you down.” Optus is conducting a thorough investigation and once concluded will share the facts of the incident publicly, Rue said. It will also cooperate fully and transparently with all relevant government agencies and regulatory bodies, he said.
Optus is Australia’s second-largest phone company and has been under pressure after a series of missteps. The November 2023 outage cost then-CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin her job. That followed a 2022 cyberattack that exposed personal data of millions.
Rue, who took the helm in November, was brought in to stabilize the business and rebuild trust. Despite repeated setbacks, SingTel has stood by Optus, saying last year it wasn’t in talks to sell the unit after reports linked the private equity arm of Canadian asset manager Brookfield Corp. to a possible stake.
The deaths are “the nightmare scenario many of us have long feared,” industry consultant Paul Budde said in a statement. “Once more, it appears the cause was a human error during a network update. Such faults should not escalate to system-wide collapse.”
Normally, emergency calls should be rerouted to a rival carrier during outages and this was where the failure occurred, local media reported.
There have been other similar instances. In March 2024, Australia’s biggest telecommunications company Telstra Group Ltd. was fined by the regulator after it failed to transfer calls to emergency services.
Premier of South Australia Peter Malinauskas said there are a lot of questions for Optus to answer.
“Optus hasn’t met the standards that are imposed on them by the Federal government, or that’s the way it appears,” he said Saturday in a televised news conference. “There will have to be a really sharp and inquisitive examination of all the technical failings that have occurred here.”
(Updates with Communications Minister comments in third paragraph)
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