Optus 000 outage is the latest PR crisis for an Australian company that still doesn’t understand what it means to lead

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Sally Branson Crisis PR expert September 21, 2025 — 7.35pm

What do you say when the unthinkable happens? When your company’s failure is linked to three deaths, what words could possibly suffice? After all, is there a worse nightmare than calling for help that doesn’t come?

For Optus, the cost of its latest crisis extends far beyond the deaths that have been linked to Thursday’s Triple Zero outage. While preliminary investigations now suggest the death of a newborn baby is unlikely to have been caused by the outage, the clarification is already too late – the narrative that it was involved is already seared into public consciousness.

Here lies one of the fundamental challenges of crisis communication in 2025: we live in a w