When The Lights Go Out, Your Reputation Is On
Over the past two years, Australia has had a run of high-impact outages across telcos, transport, retail and critical services. The pattern is familiar: systems fail, customers scramble, and the public judges you not only for going down, but for how you show up when you do. Optus is again the defining case study — first the nationwide outage in November 2023, now the Triple Zero failures on 18 September 2025. The question is whether leadership has really learned how to manage trust under pressure.
What Optus keeps getting wrong
Two things stand out. First, critical-path protection failed where it mattered most. A routine firewall upgrade contributed to emergency calls not getting through in SA, WA, NT and parts of NSW, with hundreds of failed 000 calls and deaths now under investigation. That is the very scenario resilience planning exists to prevent.
Second, communications and escalation were too slow and too narrow. Agencies expected real-time alerts and consistent information after the 2023 review and regulatory scrutiny. Yet SA Ambulance says it received no notifications during the 2025 event, while state leaders and police complained they learned key facts late, after public statements were already underway. When emergency services have to ring your CEO to get data, you have a governance problem, not a messaging problem.
Optus has since brought in external advisers to assess operations and its parent, Singtel, is publicly backing the leadership for now. That may steady internal nerves, but it does not by itself rebuild trust with customers, premiers or police commissioners who expect automatic, verifiable alerts and clockwork updates. Trust follows visible changes in controls and behaviour, not a consultant’s logo.
New CEO, old decisions?
Stephen Rue became CEO in November 2024 with a mandate to lift resilience and repair reputation after 2023. A year on, the 000 outage suggests the company is still making the same category of decisions: technical changes without airtight safeguards, and stakeholder communications that lag the incident curve. The last Optus CEO did not survive the reputational weight of repeated crises. Will this one? He might — but only if Optus proves, fast, that it can protect emergency calling above all else, notify the right people first, and publish a plain-English root cause with the specific controls added and independently tested. Anything less and the market will conclude the culture, not just the systems, is the risk.
Trust is built before the outage
Trust does not start at the media conference. It is the sum of choices leaders make long before anything breaks. Design for failure and rehearse recovery. Protect lifelines first, especially emergency services and payments. Make accountability clear so decisions move fast and the right people get notified first time, every time. The 2023 review and the 2025 experience both show that regulators now treat communications obligations as part of essential service delivery, not an optional extra.
Say less, say it sooner
In a live incident, useful beats perfect. Say what you know, what you do not, and what happens next. Set the time for your next update and keep it, even if the message is simply that work continues. Use every channel that still works and push priority alerts to emergency services and government first, then customers. When you treat people with respect under pressure, you buy time and credibility — and you avoid premiers hearing about their own state’s risk from a press conference livestream.
Competence is your message
Customers remember how quickly you stabilised the experience. Keep essential services running, offer practical workarounds, and put a human voice out early. Leaders own the impact while technical teams fix the problem. After the event, show your homework. Publish the root cause, the fixes, and the independent validation plan. Report the resilience metrics that matter: time to detect, time to notify authorities, time to communicate publicly, and time to recover — then track whether those numbers improve.
Crisis management in the first 120 minutes
Declare the incident, scope and first detection time.
Tell customers what to do now, including any safety or payment workarounds.
Prioritise essential services and vulnerable users.
Publish the time of your next update and meet it.
Provide clear workarounds and service alternatives.
Log decisions, data and customer impacts for the review and future training.
Final thought
Australians can accept that complex systems fail. They will not accept leaders who leave them — or their emergency services — in the dark. Optus has another chance to prove it understands this. If the company hard-wires critical-path protection and real-time alerts, and backs that with transparent, clockwork communications, the new CEO will keep his footing. If not, the story will write itself.