A Singtel delegation will visit Australia this week to meet the country’s communications minister and discuss the fallout from the Sep 18 outage linked to three deaths
[SINGAPORE] Shares of Singtel fell on Monday (Sep 29) morning as its Australian subsidiary Optus suffered a new outage over the weekend – not long after a similar incident at the unit led to a few deaths.
The counter fell to S$4.10 at 9.27 am, 3.8 per cent or S$0.16 lower than Friday’s closing price of S$4.26, with 9.8 million shares changing hands. This is the lowest price Singtel shares have hit in over a month as they last fell lower on Aug 22, ShareInvestor data indicated.
By 9.43 am, it had recovered to S$4.14, but was still down by 2.8 per cent or S$0.12, with around 11.9 million shares transacted.
On Sep 27, the unit suffered an outage that affected some 4,500 customers and disrupted calls made between 3 am and 12.20 pm – including emergency calls.
Optus said that it has confirmed with the police that callers who attempted to make emergency calls are okay and that it is investigating the cause of the issue, which involves a mobile phone tower site in the Dapto area of New South Wales.
This latest outage comes as a Singtel delegation meets Australia Communications Minister Anika Wells this week to discuss the fallout from another recent Optus outage on Sep 18 that is linked to several fatalities, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
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On Sep 18, a standard network upgrade resulted in a technical failure that affected emergency calls in parts of Australia, leading to three deaths. Welfare checks on households that attempted to make emergency calls revealed that three people were found dead, said Optus chief executive officer Stephen Rue at a Sep 19 press conference.
The Australian government has since started an investigation into the botched network upgrade that caused fatalities, and Wells stated at a Sep 22 press conference that regulatory or legislative changes could be considered after the probe is completed.
In November 2023, another similar incident occurred where Optus experienced an Australia-wide outage that affected millions of customers, preventing some from making emergency calls. That incident cost former Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin her job, and the latest could threaten the position of Optus’ current boss Rue.
