Copyright Reuters
*Stephen Rue started in the role a year ago following a massive cyber attack and separate half-day outage which resulted in the previous CEO leaving. Sign up here. *On September 18, Optus said a failure of its "000" emergency line affected thousands of people and four died as a result of the inability to contact emergency services. *Rue told an Australian Senate hearing there are questions about his position but "another change of leader at this time is not what Optus needs or what our customers need". *He added that "the disruption and uncertainty could actually set back the transformation underway and create further risks." *Optus announced on October 23 that its CFO Michael Venter and Chief Information Officer Mark Potter would be stepping down early in 2026. KEY CONTEXT *Optus has been under intense political and regulatory scrutiny since a 2022 cyber attack exposed millions of people's personal details to criminals. *The event resulted in a sweeping overhaul of Australia's cyber-readiness and response rules including mandatory reporting and increased fines for prevention failure. *In 2023, millions of Optus residential and business customers were without phone or internet for most of a day after a routine software upgrade inadvertently sent its entire network offline until it was rebooted manually. *Rue told parliament the September 2025 emergency line outage was caused by human error during a routine firewall upgrade which meant that traffic wasn't diverted before locking the equipment that was being upgraded. Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Sonali Paul
