Optus CEO Stephen Rue has once again apologized for the company's network outage in September, which impacted calls to the country's emergency services network (Triple Zero) in Australia.

Rue made the comments as he delivered a statement to Australia's Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications on November 3.

It relates back to the September 18 outage, during which four people died and more than 600 customers were impacted. Optus stated that the outage was caused by a technical failure that occurred during a network upgrade.

Triple Zero (000) is Australia's main emergency service phone number.

Following the outage, Australia's federal government told the carrier it can expect major financial penalties.

Australia's communications minister Anika Wells said Optus “failed the Australian people," while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Optus’s behavior was “completely unacceptable."

"As the CEO, I am accountable for Optus’ failings, and I am deeply sorry. We are all deeply sorry. The tragic deaths of people during this outage will stay with us as individuals and as a company as we investigate the incident and build on our response while progressing a sweeping transformation of Optus," said Rue.

In his statement, he also acknowledged his future, stating that he will remain in place. Rue notes that a change in leadership wouldn't be helpful for the carrier.

"Understandably, there are questions arising about my position, but I firmly believe that another change of leader at this time is not what Optus needs, or what our customers need," said Rue. "The disruption and uncertainty could actually set back the transformation underway and create further risks."

Rue only took over as CEO at Optus last November, replacing Kelly Bayer, who resigned amid the fallout from a previous outage that lasted more than 14 hours in November 2023.

As such, the carrier was slapped with an AU$12 million (US$7.93m) fine. Its head of networks, Lambo Kanagaratnam, also quit months later.

Slammed for response time

Optus' efforts to restore its reputation took a blow, however, when it emerged that the telco took several hours to inform the government of the outage and its impact.

As noted by The Guardian, Optus was first advised of a fatality at around 8:43 pm on September 18, but senior management was not informed until after midnight on the 19th, while Rue said he was only told at around 8 am on the 19th.

It wasn't until 2 pm that Optus informed the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) about the fatalities.

This led to severe scrutiny from Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who asked Optus: "What on earth were you doing between 8 am in the morning and 2 pm?"

In response, Rue said that Optus was gathering information and completing welfare checks. This answer didn't wash with the Senator, however.

"You weren’t doing that, you had people doing that. What were you doing? … You made sure the board knew, but you didn’t call the minister or the regulator," said Hanson-Young.

"You were too busy putting your ducks in order, telling your board what was going on, contacting your executives, making sure that your company’s ducks were in order. Meanwhile, the federal government, the regulator, and the minister were left in the dark."

"Human error"

Rue explained to the Senate that the outage was initially caused by human error.

Rue noted that the outage was not caused by a complex system failure, but instead a "unique circumstance where Triple Zero was down while other calls continued normally."

"The initial mistake - a human error - occurred when the wrong process plan was selected for a routine firewall upgrade. The selected plan did not divert traffic before locking equipment inside the exchange that routes Triple Zero calls," said Rue.

According to Rue, the error wasn't detected because control steps were not followed and were not acted on at the time.

Rue said this scenario had impacted existing systems and processes for detecting the outage while in progress, responding to customer calls alerting Optus to the outage, understanding the extent of the outage, and accessing customer data for welfare checks.