Singtel pledges support for troubled Optus after recent outage

Amid widespread concern over a September emergency hotline outage at Optus that has been linked to three fatalities, Singtel has expressed its commitment to tackling the underlying problems at its wholly owned Australian subsidiary.

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A key step is the appointment of global consulting firm Kearney to provide independent additional oversight of the Optus mobile network. This was announced on Sept 30 by Optus chairman John Arthur, following a meeting with Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells, Singtel Group chief executive officer Yuen Kuan Moon and Optus CEO Stephen Rue.

Mr Yuen told The Business Times: “We've always respected the laws and regulations of the jurisdictions we operate in, and will cooperate fully with the Australian authorities to improve. We will also fully assist and cooperate with the independent panel to find the root causes and rectify the issues.”

He added: “We will continue to fully support the Optus board and management as they work through this incident and accelerate the changes needed. We are committed to the continued transformation of Optus to improve the processes and resilience of the company, and improve the reliability of critical services.”

His comments came in the wake of an outage on Sept 18, during which users were unable to make Triple Zero or emergency calls. Some 600 people across South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were affected for more than 10 hours.

Another outage on Sept 28 was much smaller in scale, involving one out of more than 9,000 mobile cell sites or towers across Australia.

But there have been other high-profile incidents in recent years, including a mis-selling case involving vulnerable customers, a nationwide outage in 2023, and a data cyber attack in 2022.

These incidents have sparked harsh criticism of Singtel, including suggestions that it has underinvested in Optus and been hands-off in managing the subsidiary.

The telco's shares have fallen since reaching a 2025 high of $4.41 in September. Singtel closed 0.94 per cent lower at $4.21 on Oct 6. In the year to date, the counter is up some 36 per cent.