Optus leadership at the Senate Hearing on 3 November: Paul O’Sullivan, Former Chairman; John Arthur, Chairman; Stephen Rue, CEO; and Michael Venter, CFO. Image: Screenshot.
Optus chief executive officer Stephen Rue has defended his position leading the telco despite the recent triple-zero outages linked to the deaths of several Australians who were unable to access emergency services.
Mr Rue and other Optus executives were grilled in lengthy questioning during a quickly convened Senate inquiry on Monday (3 November), as Senators attempted to get to the bottom of the tragic system failure.
On 18 September, emergency calls were blocked through Optus in South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of NSW.
The deaths of two people in South Australia and one in WA have been linked to those outages. A fourth death, of an infant in SA, is likely unrelated.
A separate outage on 28 September blocked more calls to triple zero through an Optus tower in Dapto, in the NSW Illawarra region.
Mr Rue said the 18 September failures were mistakenly caused by an upgrade to the network and acknowledged they were unacceptable.
But he said while he was accountable as CEO for the outages, changing the guard was not the answer.
“I’m deeply sorry,” Mr Rue told the hearing.
“The tragic deaths of people during this outage stay with us as individuals and as a company as we investigate the incident.
“I fully accept there are aspects to the way events unfolded and how they were communicated over September 18 and 19 that we should have handled better … I firmly believe that another change of leader at this time is not what Optus needs, or what our customers need.”
Optus chairman John Arthur said there were 10 failures leading to the outages, and Mr Rue had to rectify the issues.
“There were, I think, 10 failures here. Ten failures. And if you’re asking me whether I am alarmed at that, I can assure you I am,” he said.
“However, this man [Mr Rue] was brought into this company to make sure we became a company that didn’t have 10 failures like that. Now that’s his job, and I’m expecting him to finish it.”
Mr Arthur added that there would be fallout from the investigations into the incidents when the “dust settles” and all the facts are known.
“I never in my life want to be in the position I’m in today where I have to answer these sorts of questions about a company I’m associated with,” he said.
“The board will, as is its duty, deal with accountabilities.”
The Optus executives, however, took numerous questions on notice – something Coalition Senators were not happy about.
Liberal backbencher Sarah Henderson said she believed the company was in breach of Senate rules in doing so.
“I don’t have the confidence at this point in time that Optus will do the right thing,” Senator Henderson said.
“And so therefore I believe we need full facts in relation to what Optus is going to do in relation to those failed triple-zero calls.
“They provide a service, that service failed. So I think Optus has got huge liability, and we demand answers as to what they are going to do for these families.
“There were 10 different points of failure. There were five calls to the overseas call centre, which were never escalated.
“The CEO sat on his hands and for many hours didn’t inform ACMA [Australian Communications and Media Authority] the regulator, and the minister’s office about the true scale of the catastrophe, with three people confirmed dead as a result of what happened on that terrible and fateful day.”
Senator Henderson has repeated her call for Communications Minister Anika Wells to front the Senate inquiry.
Fellow Liberal backbencher Dean Smith even pointed to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s office, saying it had questions to answer about what it knew and when about the Optus outages.
Optus denies misleading the minister with wrong information about the 18 September outages.
It was 24 hours after the event that the public was informed of the failures. Eleven crisis meetings of Optus executives were held first.
Mr Rue acknowledged the initial information given to the minister was inaccurate, but it was the information the company had at the time.
It was, in fact, a far worse situation than Optus’s initial notification, which indicated that only about 10 calls had been affected. Hundreds of emergency callers were impacted.
“I wouldn’t characterise it as misleading, it was information as we knew it at the time,” Mr Rue said.
“Sadly, it turned out to be different. We accept that.”
Mr Rue first informed the parent company, Singtel, and sought to contact Optus chair John Arthur, who was on leave at the time. He also told the board.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young suggested Mr Rue was more concerned about protecting Optus than letting the government know the magnitude of the company’s failure.
Mr Rue rejected that suggestion.
Original Article published by Chris Johnson on Region Canberra.
