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.