Singtel faces another Optus crisis after fatal outage linked to three deaths in Australia

[SYDNEY] Singtel faces a fresh crisis at its Australian division Optus after the government started an investigation into an emergency call outage that resulted in multiple deaths.

Last week’s network failure follows an Australia-wide outage at Optus in November 2023 that affected millions of customers – including some who were unable to make emergency calls. That blunder cost the job of Optus’ then-boss, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.

The latest incident at Australia’s second-biggest phone company, so soon after the last, now threatens the position of Rosmarin’s successor as chief executive officer, Stephen Rue.

And there is potentially worse fallout to come. At a press conference on Monday (Sep 22), Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells said she will consider any required regulatory or legislative changes once the probe into Optus’ botched network upgrade is complete.

Wells said she had spoken to Rue to express her “unbelievable disappointment that we should be here again so soon.”

Optus accounts for about half of Singtel’s annual revenue.

Singtel shares were down 1.6 per cent at Monday’s close in Singapore, trimming the company’s market value to S$71.7 billion.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he would be surprised if Rue is not considering stepping down.

“Optus’ behaviour is completely unacceptable,” Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp on Monday. “Optus has obligations, as do other communications companies, and quite clearly they haven’t fulfilled the obligations that they have.”

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A spokesperson for Optus declined to comment.

According to Optus, a standard network upgrade on Sep 18 led to a technical failure that impacted emergency calls in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Optus said it did not receive any alarms that some emergency calls were not making it through, and that three people died.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said on Monday that it had started an investigation into Optus’ compliance with emergency call regulations.

‘Fundamental responsibility’

“Australians must be able to contact emergency services whenever they need help,” ACMA said in a statement. “This is the most fundamental responsibility every telco provider has to the public.”

Phone companies must also check up on callers who made unsuccessful emergency calls during a network outage, the same rule Optus broke in 2023. Optus was fined A$12 million (S$10.2 million) for those breaches.

CEO Rue said on Sunday that Optus would appoint an outside expert to lead an independent review into last week’s failure, and that the facts will be made public.

“We will get recommendations of what to do and I’m determined that we will implement those,” he said in a televised news conference.

One of the tasks of the internal review will be to look at the effectiveness of the changes Optus put in place after the 2023 outage, he added.

Optus has begun monitoring so-called triple zero call volumes and failure rates state-by-state, 24 hours a day, Rue said. It has also halted any network system changes. The company continues to investigate why it took 13 hours before it became aware of the failure, he said.

Rue also disclosed that as many as five calls were made to the Optus contact centre raising concerns about the triple zero service early on Sep 18, but that they hadn’t been passed on internally.

“This is clearly not good enough and we are implementing a compulsory escalation process following any customer reports of triple zero outages,” he said. BLOOMBERG