Mark Forbes.
By Mark Forbes, Director, ICON Reputation, former Editor-in-Chief of The Age.
When Optus revealed a Triple Zero outage linked to multiple deaths, it held a press conference at 5.44pm on Friday evening. The timing was no accident. It was straight out of the old PR playbook: Drop the bad news late, when the media cycle slows, the next day’s front and home pages are locked in and the public (and journos) are thinking of the weekend.
It’s when you see embarrassing admissions and the release of critical reports and investigations. Ministers’ offices know that 5pm Friday slot well, they call it the time to “take out the trash”.
But in 2025, that strategy can be reputational suicide, especially for organisations or issues teetering on the edge. News runs 24/7 and outrage spreads instantly online. Trying to “bury” bad news no longer works, it can amplify it.
By waiting more than 40 hours to face the public and choosing the least transparent moment possible, Optus sent one unmistakable message: Protecting its brand mattered more than protecting the public.
The crisis fatigue effect
This would be damaging as a one-off. But Optus is not facing a single crisis, it is facing crisis fatigue. In just three years, the company has lurched from a data breach affecting 9.5 million Australians, to a nationwide outage that cut Triple Zero access for over 2,000 people, to a $100 million penalty for exploiting vulnerable customers.
Each time, it promised reform. Each time, it apologised and said things would change. And each time, another disaster followed. This time, a network upgrade prevented 600 callers' ability to access the Triple Zero emergency service has been linked to four deaths.
The public, the media, and regulators no longer believe the words. That is the danger of crisis fatigue: your reputation doesn’t collapse in one dramatic moment, it erodes piece by piece until no apology has credibility.
The “take out the trash on Friday night” tactic might once have muted headlines. Today, it signals evasion. In an era of radical transparency, delay looks like dishonesty. Reputation cannot be managed by timing alone, it must be earned through action, speed and accountability.
Optus’ delay and incapacity to answer core questions compounded the damage, compounding a reputational crisis at the very moment when trust demanded honesty and urgency.
What should have happened
Thursday morning, callers in South and Western Australia began contacting Optus call centres, complaining Triple Zero calls could not get through.
In the intervening 48 hours before Friday night’s press conference, Optus CEO Stephen Rue said they were “establishing the facts”. Sorry Stephen, you should have been informing the public and fixing the problem. An immediate alert, through all available channels, that emergency calls were not getting through on the network, should have been the priority.
Optus needed to front up immediately, confirming the issue, apologising unreservedly, outlining emergency safeguards, and keeping the public updated until the problem was resolved. That response should have been led by senior leadership. In today’s environment, actionable information, visibility and empathy matter more than polished statements.
Optus’s failure to alert key stakeholders, especially the South Australian government, before fronting the media indicates ill-formed crisis plans.
And it’s not as if Optus can claim it was caught unawares. It has experienced similar, almost identical, issues in recent years and has supposedly reviewed and renewed its crisis response.
Lessons for every brand
This is a warning for every organisation. Delaying, downplaying or distracting will deepen public mistrust. And if your brand experiences repeated failures without clear cultural and operational reform, you could face the same crisis fatigue that has left Optus on reputational life support.
Crisis communications is not about spin. It is about leadership, speed and honesty. Companies that fail to understand this won’t just lose reputation, they will lose trust. And without trust, they will eventually lose their licence to operate.
Already, Stephen Rue is facing resignation calls. His predecessor Kelly Rosmarin resigned less than two years ago following a nationwide network outage.
It’s too early to dump a CEO in the midst of a critical crisis response, but avoiding or ameliorating this precise situation should have been a core goal, given previous incidents.
The clock is ticking for Rue. As always, it is the crisis response and the communications around it that matter the most. He has one month to address the damage and convince the public and regulators that it won’t happen again on his watch, or head for the exit.