Singtel says Optus CEO needs time to fix issues after emergency call outages

SYDNEY (Reuters) -Optus's CEO will need more time to turn around the embattled telecom carrier, the boss of its parent Singapore Telecommunications, who is in Australia to confront the fallout from outages of its emergency call services, said on Tuesday. The back-to-back outages, which happened less than two weeks apart, follow a string of other high-profile failures at Optus including a nationwide outage and data breach, which have intensified scrutiny of the carrier’s governance and management. Singtel CEO Yuen Kuan Moon, who was summoned from Singapore to meet with Australian authorities, said it would take time for Optus CEO Stephen Rue to transform the No. 2 Australian telecoms firm. “We brought in Stephen 11 months ago to transform Optus, to really address the issues that we had since 2022-23,” Yuen told reporters in Sydney after a meeting with Communications Minister Annika Wells. “It is very early days. It takes time to transform a company.” Singtel is a unit of Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings. The latest disruption on Sunday, caused by a faulty tower south of Sydney, interrupted emergency calls and affected around 4,500 people. It came just 10 days after a botched firewall upgrade triggered an outage lasting 13 hours that disrupted emergency calls in two states and the Northern Territory and was linked to four deaths. The incidents deepen Optus’s reputational crisis following a 2022 cyberattack that compromised data on millions of customers and an A$100 million ($65.83 million) penalty this year for sales misconduct. Former Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was ousted over a nationwide outage of Optus services in 2023. Rue took the reins in November 2024 and was tasked with improving service standards for customers. ($1 = 1.5191 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Christine Chen and Renju Jose in Sydney; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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