21 September 2025: CEO, Stephen Rue Update

I would like to provide an update today and to provide further clarity on a few elements of this situation. 

I want to reiterate how sorry I am about the very sad loss of the lives of four people, who could not reach emergency services in their time of need.

Further, I acknowledge that the connection failures created immense additional distress for some of our other customers who attempted to contact the Triple Zero service on Thursday, and the news has understandably created concerns for the wider community who rightly want to know that when they need this service it will be available to them.

I would like to apologise to everyone impacted.

I was asked yesterday for additional details in relation to the cause of the upgrade failure. 

Early investigations show that it appears that established processes were not followed.  

In order to establish why this occurred, we are speaking with the individuals involved. 

As to the full technical detail of the network failure we will need to leave that for the investigation. 

What I can assure you is that actions are and will be taken to ensure this does not happen in future. 

In the short term, I have put in place an immediate halt to further changes in our network system until we have a broader understanding of the events that have occurred so we can also introduce greater monitoring, testing and compliance and reviews of our change processes.

Further, our technical teams are monitoring Triple Zero call volumes and failure rates state by state 24 hours, seven days a week. 

I have committed to providing updates where I am aware of new information. 

Yesterday I confirmed that two customers contacted our call centre early on Thursday morning to report that they could not contact Triple Zero. 

Our review of our call logs is continuing and so far as part of that process, they have found three further calls in relation to this. 

As we had not detected the Triple Zero failures in our network at the time of these calls, there were no red flags for the contact centre to alert them to any live issues. 

This is not clearly good enough, and we are implementing a new compulsory escalation process following any customer reports of Triple Zero failures through our customer call centre.

As stated, these outages impacted calls in South Australia, Western Australia and Northern Territory. 

The new information that I want to share is that I have been made aware that there were two callers from NSW who were unable to connect to emergency services. This is because they are based near the South Australian border and their calls were connected to South Australian towers.

Welfare checks on these callers have been progressed by Optus and the NSW Police and we are not aware of any further issues. 

I would now like to provide some clarity on the welfare check process as there have been some reports that we may have missed the fourth person confirmed by police as having died while a call to Triple Zero was unsuccessfully attempted. 

The welfare check process is made as follows: 

• Optus attempts to call impacted households two times.
• When we are unable to make contact, we hand it over to police and police make further contact attempts.

It was during these further enquiries that the new information became known. 

ENDS

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