Optus CEO apologises after four people died during network outage

Optus CEO Stephen Rue has issued a fresh apology following the deaths of four people who were unable to contact emergency services during a major outage of the Triple Zero system.

"I want to reiterate 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," Rue said in a statement released to the public.

"Further, I acknowledge that the connection failures created immense additional distress for some of our other customers who attempted to contact the Triple Zero service on Thursday, and the news has understandably created concerns for the wider community who rightly want to know that when they need this service it will be available to them."

"I would like to apologise to everyone impacted."

The outage affected calls made in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, but new information released by Rue also revealed that two callers in New South Wales were impacted after their mobile devices connected to South Australian towers due to their proximity to the border.

"Welfare checks on these callers have been progressed by Optus and the NSW Police and we are not aware of any further issues," Rue said.

The company is facing intense scrutiny over its network failure, with early investigations indicating that "established processes were not followed" during a recent upgrade.

"In order to establish why this occurred, we are speaking with the individuals involved," Rue said. "As to the full technical detail of the network failure we will need to leave that for the investigation."

However, he assured that measures were being taken to ensure the issue would not be repeated.

"In the short term, I have put in place an immediate halt to further changes in our network system until we have a broader understanding of the events that have occurred so we can also introduce greater monitoring, testing and compliance and reviews of our change processes."

Rue also confirmed that technical teams are now monitoring Triple Zero call volumes and failure rates across all states and territories around the clock.

The CEO further clarified the welfare check process undertaken in response to emergency call failures, following public concern that some households may have been overlooked.

"Optus attempts to call impacted households two times. When we are unable to make contact, we hand it over to police and police make further contact attempts," he said. "It was during these further enquiries that the new information became known."

Rue acknowledged that the company's internal systems failed to detect the issue when it first occurred and that calls to Optus' customer service centre about emergency call failures were not escalated.

"Yesterday I confirmed that two customers contacted our call centre early on Thursday morning to report that they could not contact Triple Zero. Our review of our call logs is continuing and so far as part of that process, they have found three further calls in relation to this."

"As we had not detected the Triple Zero failures in our network at the time of these calls, there were no red flags for the contact centre to alert them to any live issues."

"This is not clearly good enough, and we are implementing a new compulsory escalation process following any customer reports of Triple Zero failures through our customer call centre."

Rue concluded the statement by committing to further transparency as new information becomes available.

"I have committed to providing updates where I am aware of new information."

An independent investigation is expected, though Rue has not confirmed who will oversee it, stating the Optus board is "still working through" the details.