Singapore PM offers condolences to those affected by Optus outage

The Star

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he raised the recent deadly outage of Singtel-owned Optus' emergency call number with his Singaporean counterpart, Lawrence Wong, during a bilateral meeting in Canberra on Wednesday (Oct 8).   Wong offered his condolences to those affected and said he expected Optus and Singtel "to act responsibly, comply fully with Australian laws and cooperate with the ongoing inquiry."  Two back-to-back outages of the emergency "000" number last month have intensified scrutiny of Optus, Australia's second largest telecom operator that's owned by Singapore Telecommunications, majority owned by Singapore's state-run Temasek Holdings.  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.  WATCH MORE: https://thestartv.com/c/news SUBSCRIBE: https://cutt.ly/TheStar LIKE: https://fb.com/TheStarOnline

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00:00We also discussed the recent Optus emergency service outages. We had a constructive conversation.

00:11I thank very much Prime Minister Wong for his words of condolence for those who were impacted

00:17with their families. I understand fully the anger, frustration and outrage at what has happened

00:25because if this were to have happened in Singapore, I would feel the same.

00:32So from that point of view, we understand the sentiments. I've extended my condolences to those

00:39impacted by the outage, including the family members and loved ones of those who lost their lives,

00:46which is tragic. And all I can do is to say from a government's perspective, we expect our companies

00:54to act responsibly. And we will certainly expect Singtel and Optus to comply fully with the laws,

01:02to do whatever they can to cooperate with the investigation. I'm sure they will do so.

01:09And hopefully a conclusion will come true very soon on the outcome of the investigation,

01:16what went wrong, and steps can be taken expeditiously to rectify the mistakes.

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