What do you say when the unthinkable happens? When your company’s failure is linked to three deaths, what words could possibly suffice? After all, is there a worse nightmare than calling for help that doesn’t come?
For Optus, the cost of its latest crisis extends far beyond the deaths that have been linked to Thursday’s Triple Zero outage. While preliminary investigations now suggest the death of a newborn baby is unlikely to have been caused by the outage, the clarification is already too late – the narrative that it was involved is already seared into public consciousness.
Optus CEO Stephen Rue speaks to the media on Sunday.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone
Here lies one of the fundamental challenges of crisis communication in 2025: we live in a world where consumers are simultaneously more sophisticated and more fragmented than ever before. Many will dig deeper, follow updates and form complete judgments over time. But equally, there are those who read the breaking news and that’s it. They will continue to believe Optus was directly responsible for the death of a baby, even if that turns out not to be the case.
This harsh reality then makes the initial response from Optus even more critical. In an era when first impressions become permanent for many, there is no room for the kind of failures we’ve witnessed.
Because of past missteps, the general mood towards Optus was already one of mistrust and distrust. So when Optus CEO Stephen Rue held a press conference at 5.30pm on Friday, a full 28 hours after management first learned of the issue, it only added to its perception problems.
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By Saturday, we learnt that some state government officials and emergency services only learnt of the outage via Rue’s media appearance. And on Sunday, we heard that a Sydney man reported being unable to connect to Triple Zero to Optus as far back as June. As the man said, “If they acted on it, it might not have happened again to these other poor people.”
But what makes this situation particularly galling is that we’ve seen this before. This is Optus’ third major failure in recent years, and it appears lessons have either not been learnt or were never taken seriously in the first place. Its crisis playbook now is predictable: technical failure, delayed disclosure, Friday afternoon damage control, and promises that ring hollow.
People expect transparency, immediacy, and accountability from essential service providers. They expect to be informed when systems fail, not kept in the dark while companies manage their messaging and hope that by breaking the bad news on a finals weekend, the AFL will distract people.
