Australia’s Optus CEO apologises for emergency line outage, refuses to stand down

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SYDNEY (Reuters) -The CEO of Singapore Telecommunications-owned Optus apologised to Australia’s parliament for an emergency number outage that was linked to four deaths but declined to stand down, citing a need for stability.

*Stephen Rue started in the role a year ago following a massive cyber attack and separate half-day outage which resulted in the previous CEO leaving.

*On September 18, Optus said a failure of its “000” emergency line affected thousands of people and four died as a result of the inability to contact emergency services.

*Rue told an Australian Senate hearing there are questions about his position but “another change of leader at this time is not what Optus needs or what our customers need”.

*He added that “the disruption and uncertainty could actually set back the transformation underway and create further risks.”

*Optus announced on October 23 that its CFO Michael Venter and Chief Information Officer Mark Potter would be stepping down early in 2026.

KEY CONTEXT

*Optus has been under intense political and regulatory scrutiny since a 2022 cyber attack exposed millions of people’s personal details to criminals.

*The event resulted in a sweeping overhaul of Australia’s cyber-readiness and response rules including mandatory reporting and increased fines for prevention failure.

*In 2023, millions of Optus residential and business customers were without phone or internet for most of a day after a routine software upgrade inadvertently sent its entire network offline until it was rebooted manually.

*Rue told parliament the September 2025 emergency line outage was caused by human error during a routine firewall upgrade which meant that traffic wasn’t diverted before locking the equipment that was being upgraded.

(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Sonali Paul)