Four people have died after telecommunications giant Optus suffered from a major systems outage in Australia last week. Australian officials have promised the telecoms company will face « significant consequences » after hundreds of people across over half the country were left unable to call emergency services for nearly 14 hours.
The chief executive of Optus – one of the country’s two major providers – has apologised to the families of those who died, including an eight-week-old baby boy and a 74-year-old Western Australian man – and the public for the « completely unacceptable » failure. The company is under fire for its delayed handling of the incident, which is the second such outage for the firm in two years. More than 600 calls to emergency services failed last Thursday (September 18), primarily coming from South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. At least two calls to triple-0 made from southwestern New South Wales also did not connect.
However, Optus waited 40 hours to inform the public about the incident, and also did not tell regulators until the issue was resolved – counter to standard practice, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) said.
In a press conference on Friday (September 19) afternoon, Optus boss Stephen Rue blamed the outage on a technical fault identified during a network upgrade. The CEO confirmed the planned upgrade began at 12.30am on Thursday but was cut short at 1.50pm after it was notified by South Australian police that there was a problem.
Multiple customers had tried to advise the company that its network wasn’t working, but the complaints were not escalated or handled « as would be expected, » he said.
« I would like to reiterate how sorry I am about the very sad loss of the lives of four people who could not reach emergency services in their time of need, » Mr Rue said on Sunday. « What I can assure you is that actions are and will be taken to ensure this does not happen in future. »
Australia’s communications regulator is now investigating. It had previously found Optus failed to provide access to emergency call services for 2,145 people during an outage in 2023, and then failed to check on 369 people affected afterwards. It was hit with more than $12 million (£6 million) in penalties. Mr Rue had taken over as the company’s chief executive in 2024 from Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who resigned over the 2023 outage.
Communications Minister Anika Wells on Monday said telecommunications providers had « no excuse » for triple-0 call failures and that she had spoken to Mr Rue – who the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has said should considering resigning.
« You would be unsurprised to hear that I expressed my unbelievable disappointment that we were here again so quickly. Or here again at all. »
Investigations continue, but Mr Rue has said he intends to give public updates daily « as more information becomes known ».
This comes after the UK’s busiest airport, Heathrow, was struck with an alleged cyber-attack on check-in software on Sunday, resulting in passengers facing delays and disruptions to their travel plans at airports in London, Brussels and Berlin.
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