PM Lawrence Wong expressed his condolences during an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC. -- PHOTO: MDDI
SINGAPORE (The Straits Times/ANN): Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has expressed his condolences over the deaths of three people linked to an outage on Australian telco Optus, which is wholly owned by Singtel.
Emergency calls made through Optus’ network were disrupted for 13 or so hours on Sept 18, in the telco’s second major outage since 2023.
In an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC released on Oct 6, PM Wong said: “First of all, I can fully understand the anger, frustration and outrage by what happened.
“And I would like to extend my condolences to everyone who has been impacted by the outage, especially the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives.”
The Sept 18 outage affected around 600 emergency callers, with three people, all elderly, found dead from households that made calls.
Two of them were in Perth, and the other in Adelaide.
A fourth death, that of an eight-week-old boy from an Adelaide suburb, was initially linked to the outage, but this was subsequently deemed unlikely as his grandmother had immediately used another mobile phone to reach emergency services.
A smaller and unrelated outage took place in a suburb in New South Wales on Sept 28 just before a Singtel delegation led by chief executive Yuen Kuan Moon met Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells at the behest of the Australian government.
ABC global affairs editor Laura Tingle had, in the interview on Oct 2, asked PM Wong what actions he was personally taking to ensure a repeat would not occur, saying she was sure such service power outages to emergency calls would not be tolerated in Singapore.
PM Wong said: “As far as Singapore is concerned, while we may be shareholder through Temasek, we have always operated on a very clear cardinal principle that we do not get involved in commercial operations. We do not direct commercial matters.”
He added: “We want these companies to operate commercially, and when they do and when they expand overseas, we fully expect them and their subsidiaries to comply with domestic laws where they operate and to be responsible corporate citizens.”
PM Wong noted that Mr Yuen had been to Australia in the wake of the incident to respond to regulators.
“They (Singtel) will, I am sure, cooperate fully with the authorities, with the regulator, and work closely with Optus and whichever other independent parties that have been appointed to conduct a full investigation into what happened,” said PM Wong.
“And I hope they get to the bottom of it as soon as possible, identify the root causes, rectify the issue, and restore confidence and trust as soon as possible.” - The Straits Times/ANN
