Optus CEO faces scrutiny but vows to stay after fatal emergency outage

The outage, which occurred on September 18, 2025, left customers across South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of New South Wales unable to reach emergency services for up to 15 hours.

An internal investigation found that a firewall software upgrade, carried out without full adherence to Optus’s own operational procedures, had inadvertently blocked network traffic to critical systems.

Speaking before a parliamentary inquiry in Canberra, Rue described the event as “deeply regrettable” and issued a public apology to those affected. He confirmed that Optus had already implemented “immediate corrective actions” to strengthen network resilience and emergency service connectivity.

“I want to extend my deepest apologies to the families impacted and to all Australians who rely on us,” Rue told the committee. “My focus is on ensuring such an event never happens again.”

Leadership under fire

Despite repeated calls from politicians and consumer advocates to step down, Rue insisted that leadership continuity was critical as Optus undertakes a wider transformation plan. The operator’s board, chaired by Paul O’Sullivan, has expressed full confidence in his leadership.

“I understand the anger and disappointment,” Rue said, “but my responsibility now is to fix what went wrong and deliver stability for our customers and employees.”

The incident has intensified scrutiny on Optus, which is already under pressure following a series of crises, including a 2022 data breach that compromised personal details of nearly 10 million Australians, and a 2023 national network outage that disrupted services for more than 10 million users.

Regulatory response and industry impact

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has launched an investigation into the outage, focusing on whether Optus breached obligations under the Telecommunications (Emergency Call Service) Determination. The government has signalled that penalties, including fines or licence conditions, are possible once the independent review, led by infrastructure expert Dr Kerry Schott, concludes.

Industry analysts say the event could trigger a regulatory overhaul of Australia’s emergency call routing and network redundancy standards, bringing them closer in line with models used in Europe and the United States.

“Reliability of emergency services access is non-negotiable,” said one Sydney-based analyst. “This will likely accelerate moves to mandate multi-operator routing and real-time failover between carriers.”

Operational reforms underway

Optus has since announced plans to bring network monitoring operations back in-house, ending a managed services contract with Nokia earlier than scheduled. It has also created a dedicated team to oversee vulnerable customer access and emergency call escalation, with new 24/7 monitoring for call failure rates.

The company maintains that its network remains fundamentally sound but accepts that procedural failures led to the outage. Rue said additional training and process audits are underway across all network operations units.

While the reputational fallout has been severe, analysts note that Optus’s majority shareholder Singtel appears committed to supporting the operator’s recovery. However, they warn that another major incident could further erode public and governmental trust in the brand.

Optus hit with fine over network outage that disrupted emergency services