Optus Faces Fresh Scrutiny After Consecutive Emergency Call Outages

Optus is under renewed pressure after two emergency call outages within two weeks disrupted services for thousands of Australians and were linked to four deaths. The incidents have intensified criticism of the company’s governance and raised calls for leadership changes, just months after its former CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin stepped down following a nationwide outage in 2023.

Optus CEO Stephen Rue, who took charge in November 2024, is now facing mounting scrutiny. Parent company Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel) defended Rue, with Singtel CEO Yuen Kuan Moon stressing that turning around Australia’s second-largest telecom carrier will take time. “We brought in Stephen 11 months ago to transform Optus, to really address the issues we had since 2022-23,” Yuen told reporters in Sydney. He emphasized that the transformation is still in its early stages.

The outages compound Optus’s reputational woes following the massive 2022 cyberattack that exposed data on millions of customers, and a A$100 million fine earlier this year for sales misconduct. Shares in Singtel, majority owned by Temasek Holdings, dropped up to 2% following the latest disruption.

The most recent failure, which interrupted triple zero (000) calls for about 4,500 people, was attributed to a faulty tower south of Sydney. Just ten days earlier, a firewall upgrade error caused a 13-hour outage impacting multiple states and the Northern Territory, which has been linked to several fatalities. Optus Chairman John Arthur said the problems were not due to insufficient investment from Singtel, while Yuen attributed the September outage to “a people issue.”

Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells said there is a “very serious lack of confidence” in Optus’s ability to deliver emergency services. She has called for external oversight, stressing that Australians need assurance from independent bodies rather than Optus alone.

With mounting political, regulatory, and customer pressure, Optus’s leadership faces a crucial test in restoring trust and proving its capacity to deliver reliable services.