Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Communications Minister Anika Wells have condemned Optus for its outage last week that left hundreds of people unable to call emergency services, resulting in three deaths.
More than 600 calls failed, primarily coming from South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. Optus waited 40 hours to inform the public about the incident, and also did not tell regulators including the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA) about it until after it was resolved, contrary to standard practice.
A 68-year-old woman in Adelaide, and two men in Perth aged 74 and 49, died during the outage. An eight-week-old baby in Adelaide also died with initial reports that the outage contributed to his death, which was since found unlikely by South Australian police.
Optus’ CEO Stephen Rue delivered a number of updates over the weekend, including admitting the telco was unaware of the incident for 13 hours, despite several customer complaints. He said welfare checks were conducted after services were restored, and he apologised profusely for the outage and the subsequent deaths.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he “would be surprised” if Rue was not considering resigning from his position after the outage.
“Optus has obligations, as do other communications companies, and clearly they haven’t fulfilled the obligations that they have,” Albanese told the ABC from New York. “What we want is to ensure that something like this shouldn’t happen.”
Meanwhile, at a press conference in Brisbane on Monday, Communications Minister Anika Wells described the outage as “an enormous failure” on Optus’ part, warning that the telecommunications company can “expect to face significant consequences”.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
“People have a right to be livid about what has happened here, and right now our focus is getting to the bottom of what went wrong before we determine what happens next. But Optus will be held to account,” she said.
“This is not good enough. It seems that Optus was told about this issue and to not act, which is not good enough. They have serious questions to answer now about their own processes, why they weren’t followed, and what went wrong. And the reasons for this will be part of the investigation.”
The ACMA investigation has begun, led by the regulator’s head Nerida O’Loughlin, who was with Wells at the press conference. Wells said ACMA will “be considered” about their response, but “there will be consequences”.
“They, and all providers, have no excuses here.”
The regulator has previously found Optus failed to provide access to emergency call services during a nation-wide outage in 2023, and then failed to check on 369 people affected afterwards. It directly affected more than 10 million Australians and 400,000 businesses, with nearly 3,000 emergency calls prevented. Optus was penalised over $12 million.
