Optus, which is owned by Singapore Telecommunications, has been in turmoil since the botched network upgrade prevented some customers from calling emergency services and led to multiple deaths. The network failure occurred less than two years after a similar incident impacted millions of Optus customers, including some emergency callers, and led to the resignation Kelly Bayer Rosmarin as chief executive officer.
Optus management has been sharply criticised in an independent review into September’s fatal emergency call outage, which found that a series of avoidable failures and cultural shortcomings at the Australian telecommunications company contributed to the incident.
The report by veteran executive Kerry Schott found Optus ignored basic protocols during a network update that triggered the problem, and lacked automated safeguards that should have detected failures in the emergency call system within minutes. Instead, the outage went unnoticed by senior teams for more than 13 hours, despite customers alerting the company’s call centres early in the day.
