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.

Optus CEO Stephen Rue speaks to the media on Sunday.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

Here lies one of the fundamental challenges of crisis communication in 2025: we live in a world where consumers are simultaneously more sophisticated and more fragmented than ever before. Many will dig deeper, follow updates and form complete judgments over time. But equally, there are those who read the breaking news and that’s it. They will continue to believe Optus was directly responsible for the death of a baby, even if that turns out not to be the case.

This harsh........

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