The executives, including CEO Stephen Rue, were subjected to brutal grilling from an Australian parliamentary committee. They were peppered on their response to a vital triple-zero outage in September, associated with three people’s deaths. During the session Rue called that failure “unacceptable” and publicly apologized for the tragic incident. He similarly detailed the steps the company is taking to avert future occurrences.
The committee heard that Rue was informed of the first fatality related to the outage at 8:43 PM on September 18, but senior management did not receive this information until after midnight. Rue himself only woke up to realize what was happening around 8 AM on September 19th. Despite this, he did not contact the government regulator or the Communications Minister, Anika Wells, until approximately 2:30 PM that same day.
Rue acknowledged that there were “10 failures” within the response process, admitting, “people effectively didn’t do their jobs.” He emphasized the need for accountability, stating, “I’m accountable for Optus’ failings, and I’m deeply sorry. We are all deeply sorry.”
In no small part because of these failures, Rue decided to go big or go home. Now, onshore, Australian call centers will deal with triple-zero complaint calls, improving service for our elderly and vulnerable customers. Ultimately, this decision will shorten response times, while providing more reliable service in times of emergencies and disasters.
Throughout the hearing, Rue stood by his management style, claiming that a change in leadership would not solve the root cause of the problems. To help inform the process, he began hosting a series of in-depth discussions with members of his team. They provided welfare checks during the critical hours immediately following the outage.
Rue’s testimony raised alarm bells that led to a hard questioning from members of the committee. Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young slammed his late-night letters to ministers. “What on earth were you doing between 8 AM in the morning and 2 PM?” she asked, highlighting concerns about transparency during the crisis.
John Arthur, another committee member, voiced concern at the noted breakdowns. “There were, I think, 10 failures here, 10 failures. If you’re asking me whether I am alarmed at that, I can assure you I am,” he stated. He too highlighted that Rue was brought into Optus to make sure this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again.
Rue reinforced his commitment to improving Optus’ operations, stating, “Actually set back that plan, which would not be good for customers and the telecommunications sector.” In his characteristically confident style, he promised Australians that this kind of failure would never happen again.
