The government has asked Optus’s parent company to appoint an external reviewer to hold Optus to account after triple-zero outages this month, to address the “serious lack of confidence” Australians have in the telco.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said Optus had “let down its customers and has let down the nation” after two outages in less than a fortnight piled political and public pressure on the company.

The communications minister, Anika Wells, met Singtel’s chief executive , Yuen Kuan Moon, the Optus chair, John Arthur, and its chief executive, Stephen Rue, in Sydney on Tuesday morning.

On 18 September, a network firewall upgrade blocked emergency calls for Optus customers in South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and parts of New South Wales. Anik

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