Seven-hour delay in Optus call to minister Anika Wells
Optus CEO Stephen Rue has revealed a seven-hour delay between learning of deaths during September’s triple-0 outage and informing the government, while refusing to resign.
Embattled telco Optus left a seven-hour gap between informing its chief executive, Stephen Rue, that people had died in the midst of its catastrophic triple-0 outage and informing the Albanese government of the fatalities.
Under intense scrutiny during a parliamentary appearance on Monday, the Optus boss refused to say whether the company had broken the law while conceding crucial information had not been properly escalated through the company’s chain of command.
Grilled by senators for the first time since the September 18 outage, linked to three deaths, Mr Rue unreservedly apologised for the outage but rebuffed calls for his resignation, saying his exit would only undercut efforts to rebuild trust in the company.
“There are questions arising about my position but I firmly believe that another change of leader at this time is not what Optus needs, nor what our customers need,” he said, revealing that the company would also re-assume control of network operations from Nokia.
In 2018, Optus outsourced major components of its network management to the Finnish telecommunications giant, shifting much of the operation to Chennai in India and making about 170 Australian staff redundant. “We had decided back in May to transition back to Optus our services around network operating centres,” Mr Rue told senators, partly attributing the outage to Nokia, which had been conducting a firewall upgrade when triple-zero calls went unanswered. “Some of those [involved] were Optus personnel, some were Nokia personnel.”
Optus will also add about 300 people to its Australian call centres focused on assisting those calling triple-0 and other vulnerable customers, Mr Rue said, supplementing thousands of call centre staff employed in India and The Philippines.
In a detailed submission tabled to the Senate inquiry probing the emergency call service, Optus said the first outage occurred shortly after the upgrade commenced at 12.18am on September 18. In the hours that followed, multiple incident tickets were raised about the matter, with Optus and Nokia staff liaising on the issue. They did not recognise the impact on triple-zero services, the submission says.
It was only at 10.13am, when one of its overseas call centres was first alerted, that Optus became aware of the triple-0 outage, the submission shows. A “major incident” was subsequently declared at 1.51pm. Mr Rue was briefed at 2.51pm and told only 10 calls had been affected.
By 8:05pm, Optus’s chief corporate affairs officer, Felicity Ross, was informed by the company’s director of security and public safety that as many as 100 emergency calls had been missed. That information was not passed on to Mr Rue, prompting him to concede there had been multiple “escalation failures” in the company’s response. Ms Ross told the hearing: “I definitely wish I had spoken to the CEO.”
Welfare checks began at 8.34pm, and soon after Optus was notified of its first fatality, followed by a second before midnight. At 12.25am on September 19, a contact centre manager emailed several executives to report the deaths but the message was not read until a 6am meeting.
At 6.21am, Optus’s security and public safety director informed Ms Ross of the fatalities. She tried to call Mr Rue at 7.37am but he did not answer. He returned the call at 8.13am and received the news.
Mr Rue’s handling of the hours that followed drew most criticism at Monday’s parliamentary inquiry, after it emerged neither the regulator nor minister was told for several more hours. The industry regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, was not informed of the fatalities until 2.36pm, while the office of Communications Minister Anika Wells was notified at 3.34pm.
In one particularly heated exchange at Monday’s hearing, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young accused Mr Rue of making sure Optus’s “ducks were in order” by contacting board members and other executives ahead of alerting authorities. “Meanwhile, the federal government, the regulator and the minister were left in the dark,” she said.
Mr Rue replied: “The judgment I had was that it was best to get the information accurately together, and then inform the regulator, the department and the minister’s office.”
While Mr Rue faces calls from the Coalition and Greens to quit the telco and restore public trust in the triple-0 system, Optus chair John Arthur, also appearing before the Senate inquiry, expressed confidence in him.
“Mr Rue was recruited with the express mandate, with the primary accountability, to turn Optus into the sort of company that does not let its customers and the community down in this way; his primary accountability is to fix this company,” he said.
Under questioning from Liberal senator Sarah Henderson, Mr Rue refused to say whether the telco’s response to the triple-0 outage constituted a breach of laws or regulations, saying he would have to take the question on notice. He also declined to say whether he had met with the families of those who had died.
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