Optus outage unacceptable, 'let down the nation', says Australian PM

CEO of Singtel, which owns the firm, says failure appeared to be due to human error

- Jonathan Pearlman For The Straits Times

"let down the nation" following a fatal outage of its emergency services calls on Sept 18, as Singtel chief executive Yuen Kuan Moon said the failure appeared to be due to human error.

On Sept 30, Mr Yuen, Optus chief executive Stephen Rue and chairman John Arthur met federal Communications Minister Anika Wells in Sydney to discuss the outage.

After the meeting, Ms Wells told reporters that the Sept 18 outage – which led to more than 600 people being unable to reach the police, the fire department and ambulance services and was linked to three deaths – must “never happen again”. She said Optus should employ external advisers to independently assess its network plans.

“We have made clear that Optus is accountable for what happened,” she said.

Mr Albanese told reporters that Optus’ outage was an “unacceptable failure”.

“We're not satisfied with any of Optus’ behaviour,” he said during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. “Optus has let down its customers and has let down the nation.”

The public and political pressure on Optus has been particularly intense following the Sept 18 outage, which occurred during a network upgrade, and a further limited outage on Sept 28.