Optus chief executive Stephen Rue is facing accusations he may have misled a Senate inquiry by evading questions about the company’s handling of a catastrophic network failure that blocked Triple Zero emergency calls and has been linked to multiple fatalities.

During heated exchanges at Monday’s hearing, senators accused Rue and his executives of providing inconsistent information to regulators and ministers, failing to escalate critical information internally, and withholding the full scale of the disaster from authorities for more than 24 hours.

On Monday, Rue and other Optus executives fronted a Senate inquiry into the catastrophic September 18, 2025 outage that prevented 605 customers from reaching Triple Zero for more than 14 hours.

Senators repeatedly pressed the executives on com

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