Optus executives have come under fire for delays in passing on critical information about a fatality linked to a triple-zero outage during a parliamentary inquiry.
The September outage, which stopped hundreds of Australians from making triple-zero calls, is linked to the deaths of three people.
During a Senate investigation on Monday morning, Optus chief executive Stephen Rue was quizzed about when the telecommunications company first became aware that people had died.
Rue told the committee that Optus was advised of the first fatality at 8.43 pm on 18 September, and senior management were told after midnight.
Rue became aware of the information around 8am on 19 Septermber, but did not contact either the government regulator or the Communications Minister until about 2.30pm.
"What on earth were you doing between 8am in the morning and 2pm?," Greens senator Sarah-Hanson Young asked Rue.
Rue said he had been in a "series of meetings" with his team, gathering information and completing welfare checks, but added "there is no doubt that the timeline shows there were delays, there were mistakes made".
Optus has come under fire for not informing Communications Minister Anika Wells about fatalities for 17 hours. Source: AAP / Mick Tsikas
"You were too busy putting your ducks in order, telling your board what was going on, contacting your executives, making sure your company's ducks were in order," she fired up.
"Meanwhile, the federal government, the regulator, and the minister were left in the dark."
The South Australian senator said the company had prioritised "profits" over "people's safety", a characterisation that Rue rejected.
"It was important to have the facts, so I had the information I could accurately provide to the ACMA and the federal government," he said.
Optus CEO assures 'controls in place' to prevent failure
At the start of the inquiry, Rue said the September failure was "unacceptable" and personally apologised for the tragic event.
"I'm accountable for Optus' failings, and I'm deeply sorry. We are all deeply sorry," he said.
He attributed the failure to human error during a routine firewall upgrade.
"Australians can be assured we have those controls in place. People effectively didn't do their jobs," Rue told the committee.
Offshore call centres received the complaint calls that notified Optus of the triple-zero outage. As a result of the September process failures, Rue revealed that complaint calls for triple zero, elderly and other vulnerable customers would now be handled by onshore call centres.
Rue defended his position at Optus, stating that a change in leadership would "actually set back that plan, which would not be good for customers and the telecommunications sector".
Optus chairman John Arthur said Rue had been brought on the manage these sort of outages and ensure they didn't happen again. He backed him to stay on.
"There were, I think 10 failures here, 10 failures. And if you’re asking me whether I am alarmed at that, I can assure you I am," he said.
"However, this man was brought into this company to make sure we became a company that didn’t have 10 failures like that. Now that’s his job, and I’m expecting him to finish it."
When asked if anyone had been sacked as a result of the failures, both Rue and Arthur said they would "deal with accountabilities" after the conclusion of an independent review.
The Senate inquiry is also examining the effectiveness of emergency arrangements designed to shift customers to another network if a telco has an outage.
The communications watchdog and Optus are both running investigations into the outage.
New rules that took effect on Saturday require telcos to report outages to the communications watchdog and emergency services in real time.
- with additional reporting by AAP
