Singtel-owned Optus criticised in review for failures in Australia's fatal emergency call outage

Optus’ management has been sharply criticised in an independent review into September’s fatal emergency call outage, which found that a series of avoidable failures and cultural shortcomings at Australia’s second-largest telecommunications services provider contributed to the incident.

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The report by veteran executive Kerry Schott found Singtel-owned Optus ignored basic protocols during a network update that triggered the problem, and lacked automated safeguards that should have detected failures in the emergency call system within minutes. Instead, the outage went unnoticed for more than 13 hours, despite customers alerting the company’s call centres early in the day.