20 September 2025: CEO, Stephen Rue Update

As I confirmed yesterday, Optus conducted a network upgrade on Thursday 18 September and within this process a technical failure impacted Triple Zero calls.

As has been reported, this was in relation to a firewall upgrade.

This resulted in the failure of a number of Triple Zero calls in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

The loss of the lives of three people, two in South Australia and one in Western Australia, is absolutely tragic.

I would like to once again extend my deepest condolences to their families and friends and I promise that we will fully cooperate with any and all investigations in relation to this.

In terms of our own investigation into the technical failures I can confirm that this is ongoing, and I will be fully transparent as we establish the facts of the matter. 
In this regard, I have some new information to share with you.

I would like to address the rightful question around the length of the outage and how we were alerted to this. 

The system upgrade that took place in the early hours of Thursday morning, around 12:30am, was a regular upgrade. 

When the upgrades and changes were implemented, initial testing and monitoring did not indicate there were any issues with calls connecting – normal calls were connecting as they should and call volumes at a national level did not raise any red flags. 

There was a technical failure in the system, and further, there were no alarms to alert us that some emergency calls were not making it through to emergency services. 

We became aware of the severity of the incident when a customer contacted us directly at around 1.30pm on Thursday. 

We were further notified by South Australia Police shortly thereafter (1:50pm). 
Once notified we stopped the upgrade, restoring Triple Zero, and began to confirm with relevant stakeholders such as police and other regulatory and government agencies and departments that we had experienced an outage impacting Triple Zero.

We also confirmed that once we had the call details, we would be commencing welfare checks. 

Welfare checks commenced later that evening and into the following day, Friday (the delay due to the complexity of pulling records from the network).
During the course of those welfare checks, we were advised by three households that there had been loss of life. 

While I am not able to comment in more detail regarding these individual situations as it is more appropriate for other agencies, you have my commitment that Optus will share any new information that is appropriate for us to share as we know more. 
I now would like to comment on our notifications to regulatory and government agencies and departments. 

While communication with regulatory and government agencies including police, commenced in relation to the outage on Thursday, the communication of fatalities confirmed through welfare checks was not until yesterday. 

Once we had this information and were confident of its accuracy we shared this with our Board, ACMA, the Federal Government and other bodies. 

What I have asked my team to look into is what operational notifications could and should exist between retailers and the emergency services, when there is a welfare check that determines a death has occurred. I will update further on this as I am able to establish the facts. 

I am sorry that the lack of this process led to the late notification of the Premiers and Chief Ministers, and while there was an intention to ensure an earlier awareness of our intention to speak to the media, my team did end up making contact at roughly the same time. 

That said, I reiterate my belief that there should be a formal notification process in these instances, and I have asked my team to look into that urgently. 

This was a complex situation where Optus was keen to be sure of the facts that were emerging and believed to be true, and at the same time we did not wish to delay public notification any further.

I also want to reiterate that we take full accountability for the technical failure and that we were unaware of this for a period of time which is an unacceptable gap in time I will ensure is fully investigated. 

I now want to make you aware of the fact that we have had two complaints referred to us by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. 

Both surround two individual calls to the Optus contact centre, made on Thursday morning where they complained that the Triple Zero service was not working. 

Early review suggests that we have not handled these calls as would be expected. I will be able to say more about these in due course but I do want to be transparent that we now know we were informed by two individuals that they could not connect to Triple Zero and this information was not surfaced with the relevant escalation at the time. 

We will be working with the TIO on these complaints and I will provide more details in due course. We are also conducting a review of all calls to our contact centres during the time of the outage. 

I would like to conclude this update with my confirmation that Optus will be appointing an independent person to lead a review into this entire incident from every aspect. I hope to confirm that person in the coming days but need to speak with relevant stakeholders both internally and externally to confirm prior to my announcement. 

I intend to update you daily as more information becomes known. 

ENDS

Media contact:
Optus Corporate Affairs
02 9037 8179
media@optus.com.au