Overview

• Optus said the external review will report by year‑end and cover the firewall upgrade, emergency‑call handling, network monitoring and legal compliance, with findings to be released after board consideration.
• The outage on September 18 blocked about 600 emergency calls across South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of New South Wales, with authorities linking at least three deaths to the failure.
• Chief executive Stephen Rue attributed the breakdown to a deviation from the first step of a standard firewall upgrade process, calling it human error, and confirmed five customer warnings to offshore call centres were not escalated.
• Singtel Group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon issued a formal apology, said the parent has invested more than A$9.3 billion in Optus over five years, and pledged continued support to improve reliability.
• On the same day, the Federal Court approved a A$100 million penalty over unconscionable sales to vulnerable customers as regulators investigate the Triple‑0 failure and leadership pressure intensifies, with the Optus board maintaining support for Rue pending the review.