SYDNEY: Optus’ CEO will need more time to turn around the embattled telecom carrier, the boss of its parent Singapore Telecommunications, who is in Australia to confront the fallout from outages of its emergency call services, said on Tuesday (Sep 30).
The back-to-back outages, which happened less than two weeks apart, follow a string of other high-profile failures at Optus including a nationwide outage and data breach, which have intensified scrutiny of the carrier’s governance and management.
Singtel CEO Yuen Kuan Moon, who was summoned from Singapore to meet with Australian authorities, said it would take time for Optus CEO Stephen Rue to transform the No 2 Australian telecoms firm.
“We brought in Stephen 11 months ago to transform Optus, to really address the issues that we had since 2022-23,” Yuen told reporters in Sydney after a meeting with Communications Minister Annika Wells.
“It is very early days. It takes time to transform a company. Stephen (Rue) has identified, and I believe so in the initial investigation of the 18th September incident, that it is due to a people issue, and it takes time to transform and change the people. He is here to provide the solution.”
Apologising for the Sep 18 network outage, Yuen said: “I’m here to support the Optus board and management to ensure that the independent investigation is conducted thoroughly and to make sure that future recurrence of this will not happen.”
Singtel is a unit of Singapore state investment firm Temasek Holdings.
The latest disruption on Sunday, caused by a faulty tower south of Sydney, interrupted emergency calls and affected around 4,500 people.
It came just 10 days after a botched firewall upgrade triggered an outage lasting 13 hours that disrupted emergency calls in two states and the Northern Territory and was linked to four deaths.
Australia’s communications minister said the two recent outages “has given rise to a very serious lack of confidence in both Optus and their ability to deliver triple zero services (emergency calls) to Australians when they need it most”.
The incidents deepen Optus’s reputational crisis following a 2022 cyberattack that compromised data on millions of customers and an A$100 million (US$65.83 million) penalty this year for sales misconduct.
Former Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was ousted over a nationwide outage of Optus services in 2023. Rue took the reins in November 2024 and was tasked with improving service standards for customers.
Optus board chairman John Arthur said the outage on Sep 18 was a “process-related incident”.
“People made mistakes,” he said. “It was not a question of money, it was not a question of investment, and in due course we will be talking about the extent of Singtel’s investment in Australia, which of course goes beyond Optus.”
