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The CEO of Singapore Telecommunications-owned Optus apologised to Australia’s parliament for an emergency number outage that was linked to four deaths but declined to stand down, citing a need for stability. Stephen Rue started in the role a year ago following a massive cyberattack and separate half-day outage which resulted in the previous CEO leaving. 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 on Monday there were 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 under way 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 next year. The telco has been under intense political and regulatory scrutiny since a 2022 cyberattack 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. Then CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned just a week after appearing at a similar parliamentary inquiry, where she was repeatedly asked whether she was considering her position. Rue was hired specifically to turn around Optus following the outage. On Monday, Rue told parliament the emergency line outage in September was caused by human error during a routine firewall upgrade which meant that traffic was not diverted before locking the equipment that was being upgraded. Under intense questioning by senators, he also defended his decision to tell the Singapore telco about the outage before the Australian government. Additional reporting by Bloomberg
