Singapore Telecommunications faces a fresh crisis at its Australian division Optus after the government started an investigation into an emergency call outage that resulted in multiple deaths.
Last week’s network failure follows an Australia-wide outage at Optus in November 2023 that affected millions of customers, including some who were unable to make emergency calls, reported Bloomberg.
That blunder cost the job of Optus’ then-boss, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.
The latest incident at Australia’s second-biggest phone company, so soon after the last, now threatens the position of Rosmarin’s successor as chief executive officer, Stephen Rue.
And there’s potentially worse fallout to come. At a press conference on Monday, Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells said she’ll consider any required regulatory or legislative changes once the probe into Optus’ botched network upgrade is complete.
Wells said she’d spoken to Rue to express her “unbelievable disappointment that we should be here again so soon.”
Optus accounts for about half of Singapore Telecommunications’ annual revenue. Singtel, as it’s known, is majority-owned by Singapore’s state investment fund Temasek Holdings.
