Crisis worsens for Australian telco Optus after another emergency call outage

Australian telco Optus said on Monday it had suffered another emergency call outage in an area south of Sydney, 10 days after a broader disruption that it said had probably caused four deaths when customers were unable to get timely aid.

The Australian government called the outage an "absolutely shocking failure" and has said it will seek answers from Singapore Telecommunications (STEL.SI), which owns the country's No. 2 carrier.

Singtel Group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon plans to meet Australia's Communications Minister Anika Wells this week, a spokesperson for the minister's office said. Optus Chairman John Arthur and CEO Stephen Rue will join Yuen in the meeting with Wells, Singtel said.

"Singtel takes this matter seriously and will extend full co-operation to the Australian government and authorities to address the Optus issue," a spokesperson said.

News of another failure of the "000" number for Optus has triggered a firestorm of criticism in Australia and deepened the reputational crisis for the carrier, which has struggled to rebuild trust after a string of high-profile failures in recent years.

Optus said on Monday that a faulty mobile phone tower site in Dapto, around 100 km (62 miles) south of Sydney, interrupted services, including emergency calls, on Sunday morning and impacted 4,500 people.

"Optus continues to investigate the cause ... the issue has been restored," a spokesperson said by email. The company said it "confirmed with police, all callers who attempted to contact emergency services are OK."

The incident comes less than two weeks after a botched network firewall upgrade triggered a deadly 13-hour outage on September 18 that disrupted emergency call services in two states and the Northern Territory and led to four deaths.

A country-wide network outage in 2023, where emergency calls were also disrupted, triggered a Senate inquiry and the ousting of Optus' then-CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.

Optus is also facing court action over a 2022 data breach that compromised the personal data of millions of customers and was slapped with an A$100 million ($65.68 million) fine for "unconscionable" sales conduct.

"This can't happen again. This is an absolutely shocking failure from Optus," Treasurer Jim Chalmers told reporters on Monday. "Our focus as a government is getting to the bottom of what went wrong."

Chalmers said the government had instructed the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the industry watchdog, to conduct a "very thorough investigation".

Rue, the Optus CEO, has said checks suggested the first outage could have been caused by human error and admitted procedures were not followed during the outage. Optus will also conduct an independent review that is expected to be completed by year-end.

Singtel's Singapore-listed shares fell 2.5% in afternoon trading.