Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has apologised to customers as she was lashed over her “pretty lousy” response to an outage that left more than 10 million Australians cut off from phone and internet services.
The embattled chief executive appeared before a parliamentary hearing alongside network business chief, Lambo Kanagaratnam, on Friday morning, where she defended her decision not front the media as the early in the crisis.
Committee chair, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, said it was “pretty lousy” for a communications company to not keep their customers adequately updated.
“The communication is pretty, pretty lousy. Both in the time of the crisis and in the aftermath,” she told the telco boss.
Ms Bayer Rosmarin said it was “indisputable that on that day our performance was not acceptable”.
“We let you down, and for that I am deeply sorry. I want to make it clear that we have taken immediate and ongoing steps to rectify any shortcomings,” she said.
“We have communicated directly to every Optus customer and as you know offered them not just a heartfelt apology but additional data as a gesture of thanks for the ongoing support and patience and have committed to talking to any customer or small business who has special circumstances they would like us to consider.”
The 12-hour outage last Wednesday affected Optus’ entire telephone and internet network and prevented some calls to emergency numbers. Optus had to perform a “hard reboot of the network” and the crisis was over for customers by 4pm.
But while the outage was over for the customers, Ms Bayer Rosmarin said it took Optus days to determine what caused the outage.
The cause of the outage was that key routers disconnected from the network, in response to a change in routing information that resulted from the shift to an alternate peering router, during a scheduled upgrade on the Singtel international peering network.
“The reality is that our network should have coped with this change, but on this occasion it did not,” she said.
Boss lashed for not fronting media sooner
The chief executive also defended not appearing publicly sooner, telling the parliamentary inquiry her focus was on the company’s response to the outage.
She also said she wanted to make sure she could rule out whether the outage was a result of a “malicious or ongoing attack” before speaking.
Once it was ruled out at around 10:20am, the chief said, she began speaking publicly, giving 11 radio and TV interviews and four print journalist interviews.
Ms Bayer Rosmarin denied suggestion she should have fronted up earlier, claiming it was “very unusual” for a chief executive to appear in the media during an outage.
“It’s actually unusual for a CEO to appear at all during an outage because the public would expect that my focus is on working with the team to resolve the issue,” she said.
“Our communications team was giving updates to the media fielding questions, and the team had the view at the time that this was being covered widely and all our customers knew what we knew, which is that the network was down, that we were working on it, and that we were very sorry.”
Ms Bayer Rosmarin outlined she did not know there was an issue with the network until she woke up on Wednesday morning and released her phone wasn’t working. At that point she headed straight to the office before holding a 7.45am crisis meeting.
But the Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was not contacted by the chief executive until four hours into the crisis, at 8.30am.
“When I spoke to the Minister, I shared all the information that I knew from the crisis management team and it was not very much because at that point we had no idea what had caused the issue,” she said.
“I know my team had contacted her office earlier so they also had some information and most importantly I assured her that we had everybody we needed … to try and restore the network as quickly as we could and I would keep her updated throughout the day.”
Optus ‘didn’t know’ customers had problems calling triple-0
Optus didn’t know its customers could not call emergency services via mobiles services.
“When I spoke to the Minister at that time we had every reason to believe that the triple-0 system would work as designed and that all calls would go through on alternative networks,” she said.
But she did concede the teclo did know landline customers would not be able to have contacted emergency services.
“It’s always the case that if a landline is down you can’t call triple-0. That’s known information,” she said.
A ‘very strange coincidence’
The outage was the second major crisis for the telco in the last 12 months after a cybersecurity breach compromised the personal data of customers last year.
Optus was initially concerned a “very strange coincidence” that the board of Optus’ parent company Singtel was in Australia during last Wednesday, just as it was a year ago when the teclo suffered the cyber attack.
“When we had the cyber incident, it was the last time the Singtel board was in town, and they were in town again … which was a strange coincidence,” she said.
“And so whilst they’ve ruled out the denial-of-service attack, as one technical type of cyber attack, there were other vectors of cyber malicious activity and threat intelligence that we were chasing down and it took the team until 10.20am to be able to confirm that.
“But it was a very serious concern for us in those hours up until 10.20am.”
Greens to grill Optus boss
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who is the chair of the committee overseeing the Optus inquiry, said customers had a right to know if they could continue to have confidence in the operator.
“It is an essential service being able to access your phone. Pretty much everything is done on it these days. You need to know that it will work and it will work in an emergency and the fact that Optus failed so dismally last week means they’ve got some answers to give us,” she told Sky News.
It was the second major crisis for the telco in the last 12 months after a cybersecurity breach compromised the personal data of customers.
Ahead of the Senate hearing, the Australian Financial Review reported Ms Bayer Rosmarin was considering her position.
The chief executive, who has held the top job at Optus since April 2020, could depart as soon as early next week.
Asked if Ms Bayer Rosmarin should resign, Senator Hanson-Young said it was a question for the board and the chief executive.
“But I must say I think this has been handled atrociously. It’s not the first time under this leadership that Optus has not been able to front up to the customers and tell the public what’s going on,” she said.
Optus has blamed the outage on a routine software upgrade, when changes to routing information cascaded through multiple levels of the telcos network.