The company employs around 3,600 overseas call centre workers in India and the Philippines, along with 250 domestic operators, with recent calls indicating issues in emergency call handling during the outage.

The upcoming review will examine Optus’s operational management of emergency calls, incident monitoring, and compliance with policies, procedures, and legislative requirements.

Dr. Kerry Schott, a director of AGL and chair of the federal Competition Review Panel, brings extensive experience in infrastructure, energy, and telecommunications sectors to lead the review.

Optus has appointed Dr. Kerry Schott AO to lead an independent review of the September 18 triple-0 outage, which is linked to three Australian deaths, to determine causes and evaluate company protocols.

Warnings about the outage were reportedly ignored when received from overseas call centres, as operators failed to escalate or flag the issues, contributing to the severity of the incident.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has called for the resignation of Optus CEO Stephen Rue and emphasized the need for stricter regulation and enforcement within the telecommunications industry.

The outage has sparked widespread outrage, with federal Communications Minister Anika Wells criticizing Optus for failing the Australian public and warning of serious consequences.

The incident began with a firewall upgrade in South Australia around 12:30 am, which caused approximately 600 triple-0 calls to fail and affected regions including Western Australia, Northern Territory, and New South Wales for about 13 hours.

This is not Optus's first triple-0 outage; a similar incident in 2023 affected over 2,100 people, after which the company implemented 18 government recommendations to prevent future failures.

Optus's board, including CEO Stephen Rue, is actively working to understand the failure and aims to be transparent by sharing facts about the incident.