During a tense hearing on Monday, senators accused Rue and senior Optus executives of giving inconsistent information to regulators and government ministers, failing to escalate critical updates within the company, and withholding the full extent of the crisis from authorities for more than 24 hours.

The inquiry, convened to investigate the September 18, 2025 outage, heard that 605 customers were unable to contact emergency services for over 14 hours during the network failure.

Senators grilled the executives on communication breakdowns within the company and delays in informing government officials about the severity of the incident.

Liberal senator Sarah Henderson pressed Rue on whether he had personally reached out to families of those affected by the outage. Rue repeatedly declined to answer, saying only that “the privacy of the families is paramount.”

“You are under the rules of Senate estimates, you are required to answer the question. That is not an answer, and you are ducking and weaving the question. It can be a contempt of this committee to not answer questions,” Henderson said.

Under the Parliamentary Privileges Act, the Senate holds the authority to find individuals in contempt for actions that obstruct or impede its investigations — though such penalties are rarely imposed.

During the hearing, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young criticised Rue for the significant delay in alerting both the communications regulator and the federal government that Australians had died as a result of the outage.

In his opening statement, Rue announced that Optus will hire 300 + additional staff for its Australian call centres dedicated to handling Triple Zero customers and will bring its network operations back onshore, ending reliance on overseas contractors.

The measures, he said, are part of Optus’s response to the catastrophic network failure that crippled emergency services.

Optus chair John Arthur expressed his support for Rue, but pledged that there would be accountability and consequences for staff found responsible for the Triple Zero outage.