Three people died in Australia after hundreds of emergency calls failed due to an outage on the Optus network.
Singapore’s largest telecom operator has apologised over an emergency services outage in Australia that was blamed for several deaths.
Singtel, the owner of Australian telecom Optus, issued the apology on Wednesday after hundreds of calls to Australia’s Triple Zero (000) emergency line failed during a major technical glitch last week.
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The outage on the Optus network on Thursday was linked to the deaths of three people.
In a statement published on the website of the Singapore stock exchange, Singtel CEO Yuen Kuan Moon said the company was “deeply sorry” over the incident.
“Our hearts go out to the families and friends of those who have passed away and we know that Optus will get to the bottom of this matter,” Yuen said.
“We are working with the Optus board and management to ensure a thorough investigation of this incident to prevent any future recurrence.”
Yuen added that Singtel was committed to the “ongoing transformation” of Optus under CEO Stephen Rue, who took up the position in November.
“The Singtel Group has supported Optus by investing over A$9.3 billion [$6.1bn] in the past five years with a large proportion of that put to building network infrastructure across Australia, and will continue to invest as needed for Optus to provide reliable communication services to all Australians,” Yuen said.
Rue also offered an apology.
“There are no words that can express how sorry I am about the very sad loss of the lives of four people, who could not reach emergency services in their time of need,” he said.
Singtel and Optus said Kerry Schott, an Australian executive who has held senior roles at Deutsche Bank and Sydney Water, would lead an independent review into the outage.
The apologies came as crisis-stricken Optus was on Wednesday separately fined $66m for engaging in underhand sales practices that left vulnerable customers mired in thousands of dollars of debt.
In a withering ruling, Australian Federal Court Justice Patrick O’Sullivan said Optus’s sales practices between 2019 and 2023 had been “unconscionable”, “appalling” and “extremely serious”.
O’Sullivan said Optus had subjected customers, many of them Indigenous people living in remote areas, to “undue pressure or influence” to buy products they did not need or could not afford, including multiple instances where staff sold plans to people living in areas without network coverage.
O’Sullivan said the telecom also misled customers into believing certain products were free, failed to clearly explain the terms and conditions of contracts, and pursued debt collection in cases where they had engaged in inappropriate sales practices.
O’Sullivan approved the fine after Optus and the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission agreed on the penalty in June.
Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecom, has faced a series of regulatory penalties over major network failures in recent years.
In 2024, the company was fined about $9m over another outage that disrupted more than 2,000 Triple Zero calls the previous year.
In August, Australia’s privacy watchdog filed a lawsuit over its alleged data protection failures in the run-up to a 2022 cyberattack that exposed the personal information of about 9.5 million customers.
