AUSTRALIA RAISES OPTUS OUTAGE WITH SINGAPORE- Wong expects Optus and Singapore Telecommunications to act responsibly
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he had raised the recent deadly outage of Singtel-owned Optus’s emergency call number with his Singaporean counterpart, Lawrence Wong, in a bilateral meeting held in Canberra today.
Two back-to-back outages of the emergency “000” number last month have intensified scrutiny of Optus, Australia’s second largest telecom operator. The outages occurred less than a fortnight apart and affected thousands, with the first glitch linked to four deaths because customers were unable to get timely aid.
Wong said he expected Optus and Singapore Telecommunications, majority owned by Singapore’s state-run Temasek Holdings, to act responsibly, comply fully with Australian laws and cooperate with the ongoing inquiry.
Singtel boss Yuen Kuan Moon met with Australian authorities last week, amid calls from some analysts and lawmakers for Optus CEO Stephen Rue to resign and Optus to be stripped of its operating license.
Albanese and Wong also entered into an agreement that they said would deepen the defence ties between the two countries.
