Optus faced criticism for taking 17 hours to inform Communications Minister Anika Wells about the fatalities. Source: AAP / Mick Tsikas
Senator Hanson-Young condemned the 17-hour delay in communicating the outage’s severity, stating it was “not good enough.”
At the start of the inquiry, Rue said the September failure was “unacceptable” and personally apologised for the tragic event.
“I’m accountable for Optus’ failings, and I’m deeply sorry. We are all deeply sorry,” he said.
He attributed the failure to human error during a routine firewall upgrade.
“Australians can be assured we have those controls in place. People effectively didn’t do their jobs,” Rue told the committee.
Offshore call centres received the complaint calls that notified Optus of the triple-zero outage. As a result of the September process failures, Rue revealed that complaint calls for triple zero, elderly and other vulnerable customers would now be handled by onshore call centres.
Rue defended his position at Optus, stating that a change in leadership would “actually set back that plan, which would not be good for customers and the telecommunications sector”.
Optus chairman John Arthur said Rue had been brought on the manage these sort of outages and ensure they didn’t happen again. He backed him to stay on.
“There were, I think 10 failures here, 10 failures. And if you’re asking me whether I am alarmed at that, I can assure you I am,” he said.
“However, this man was brought into this company to make sure we became a company that didn’t have 10 failures like that. Now that’s his job, and I’m expecting him to finish it.”
When asked if anyone had been sacked as a result of the failures, both Rue and Arthur said they would “deal with accountabilities” after the conclusion of an independent review.
The Senate inquiry is also examining the effectiveness of emergency arrangements designed to shift customers to another network if a telco has an outage.
The communications watchdog and Optus are both running investigations into the outage.
New rules that took effect on Saturday require telcos to report outages to the communications watchdog and emergency services in real time.
– with additional reporting by AAP
