Optus Chief Executive Stephen Rue has pushed back against calls for his sacking over a triple-zero outage linked to the deaths of three people.
The telco’s top executives faced tough questioning at a Senate inquiry on Monday, which is probing the September outage that prevented more than 600 emergency calls from connecting for more than 12 hours.
Rue said Optus accepted full responsibility, describing the event as “unacceptable”, but argued his resignation would not help the company or its customers.
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“As the CEO, I’m accountable for Optus’s failings. and I’m deeply sorry. We are all deeply sorry,” he said.
“I firmly believe that another change of leader at this time is not what Optus needs or what our customers need.
“The disruption and uncertainty could actually set back the transformation underway and create further risks.”
Rue said the outage was caused by “human error” — when the wrong process plan was selected during a routine firewall upgrade.
The failure meant triple-zero calls were down, while other calls continued normally in South Australia, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, and parts of NSW.
When asked why Optus didn’t realise there was a problem until SA Ambulance contacted them directly, Rue said alarms had gone off but were not acted upon at the time.
“The scenario where triple zero was down but other calls were continuing also had an impact on existing systems and processes for detecting the outage while in progress,” he said, adding it was “an explanation, not an excuse”.
“We absolutely should be able to quickly identify a triple zero outage,” he said.
Optus announced 300 new staff would be added to its Australian call centres, focusing on the emergency network, and that new safeguards for triple-zero calls would be introduced.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young questioned why senior Optus management were not told for hours that multiple deaths had been linked to the outage.
She also queried why there was a six-hour delay in notifying the Australian Communications and Media Authority or Communications Minister Anika Wells when Rue was personally informed about the seriousness of the issues.
“What on earth were you doing between 8am and 2pm?” Senator Hanson-Young said.
“You were too busy putting your ducks in order, telling your board what was going on, contacting your executives … meanwhile, the federal government, the regulator and the minister, were left in the dark.”
Rue defended the delay, arguing Optus was conducting welfare checks and wanted to provide government officials with accurate data.
“The judgement I made was it was best to get the information accurately together and then inform the regulator, the department and the minister’s office.”
The probe was set up to better understand what caused the September outage, which stopped hundreds of Australians from making triple-zero calls.
It will also examine the effectiveness of emergency arrangements designed to shift customers to another network if their telco has an outage.
The communications watchdog and Optus are both running their own investigations into the outage.
– With AAP
