Australia minister summons Singtel to meeting over Optus network outage linked to 3 deaths

Singtel has apologised for an outage of its Australian subsidiary Optus that disrupted emergency calls and resulted in three deaths in Australia.

Optus, the second-largest telco in Australia, is wholly owned by Singtel.

Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells told ABC on Sep. 25 that she has asked to speak with Singtel when the company delegation is in Australia the following week.

"Meeting with Singtel, I think, is an important step for us...to give Australian taxpayers confidence in our triple-0 system," she said.

What happened?

On Sep. 18, emergency call services on the Optus network were down for 13 hours in South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory, potentially affecting around 600 customers, Reuters reported.

When Optus conducted welfare checks afterwards, they learnt that three failed calls to Australia's 000 (or triple-0) emergency hotline came from households where a person later passed away, the company stated in a Sep. 19 media release.

This hotline is used to contact ambulance, police, or fire services for assistance in life-threatening or urgent emergency situations.

Those who passed were two men in Perth, aged 49 and 74, and a 68-year-old woman in Adelaide.

Initially on Sep. 19, Optus also included an eight-week-old baby boy among the deaths linked to the outage.

However, the police clarified on Sep. 21 that it was unlikely related, as the boy's grandmother immediately used another network to call triple-0, ABC reported.

What happened

The outage was caused by a technical failure during a network upgrade, Optus explained, adding that it has now been rectified.

Normal, non-emergency calls were still connecting during the outage.

During a press conference on Sep. 24, Optus CEO Stephen Rue shared the findings from the preliminary investigations.

He said, as quoted by ABC, that the technical failure occurred because staff did not follow procedures meant to protect calls during the network firewall upgrade.

He added that he did not believe the failure was linked to a lack of staff or funding from its parent company, Singtel, and emphasised that it was "a process issue".

Besides Optus's own internal investigations, the company also commissioned an independent review to identify the causes, and discuss the applicable processes, protocols, and operations of the incident.

This independent review is expected to be completed by the end of the year, and will be made public, according to Reuters.

In addition, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will also be conducting its own investigation, Wells told ABC on Sep. 25.

Singtel's response

The CEO of Singtel Group Yuen Kuan Moon apologised for what happened in a statement on Sep. 24.

"We are deeply sorry to learn about the network incident at our Optus subsidiary that has impacted Triple Zero calls, and to hear that customers could not connect to emergency services when they most needed them."

Singtel has been working with Optus to ensure a thorough investigation of the incident to prevent any future recurrence.

Yuen added that the company has invested over A$9.3 billion (S$7.9 billion) in Optus in the past five years, mostly used to build network infrastructure across Australia.

It will continue to invest as needed for Optus to provide reliable communication services in the country.

The Sep. 18 incident was Optus's second major outage in less than two years.

During a nationwide outage in November 2023, it failed to provide access to the emergency call service for 2,145 people, ABC reported.

For that incident, Optus was fined A$12 million (S$10.2 million) by the ACMA in 2024.

Related stories

Top image from Google Maps