Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel), the parent company of Australia’s second-largest telecom operator Optus, issued an apology on Wednesday after a major network outage disrupted emergency calls and has been linked to four deaths.
Singtel Group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon said the company is working with the Optus board to investigate last week’s 13-hour outage and to ensure such failures do not happen again. “We are deeply sorry to learn about the network incident at our Optus subsidiary that has impacted triple-0 calls, and to hear that customers could not connect to emergency services when they most needed them,” he said in a statement.
Optus revealed that the disruption stemmed from a network firewall upgrade gone wrong, leaving about 600 customers—some in remote areas—unable to make phone calls, including emergency calls.
Public anger over the outage has intensified, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calling the incident “completely unacceptable.”
Optus CEO Stephen Rue admitted that procedures were not followed during the incident and said preliminary checks suggested human error may have been a factor.
Kerry Schott, a non-executive director at AGL Energy, will lead an independent review into the failure. Rue said the review will focus on the technical causes, internal processes, and how triple-0 calls were managed during the outage.
The review is expected to be completed by the end of the year, with results first reported to the Optus board and then made public.