(Nov 3): Optus chief executive officer Stephen Rue said he has no plans to step down following September’s fatal emergency call outage, as his leadership and the phone company came under fire in Australia’s Parliament.
“I firmly believe that another change of leader at this time is not what Optus needs or what our customers need,” Rue said in his opening statement to a Senate inquiry into the network failure in Canberra on Monday. “The disruption and uncertainty could actually set back the transformation underway and create further risks.”
Optus, which is owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, has been in turmoil since the botched network upgrade prevented customers from calling emergency services and led to multiple deaths. Optus is Australia’s second-largest phone company and has been warned that it likely faces major financial penalties for the blunder.
The telco’s reputation is in tatters because the network failure occurred less than two years after a similar incident impacted millions of Optus customers, including some emergency callers. Then CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned just a week after appearing at a similar parliamentary inquiry, where she was repeatedly asked whether she was considering her position.
Rue was then hired specifically to turn around Optus following the 2023 outage.
Under intense questioning by senators, Rue also defended his decision to inform Singapore Telecommunications about the September outage before the Australian government.
See also: Big Tech earnings reveal cracks in case for massive AI spending
Uploaded by Liza Shireen Koshy
