Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin reveals reason she said NOTHING for hours about worst outage in Australian history as she faces a fickle Senate

Embattled Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has explained why it took her seven hours to reach customers during the telco’s nationwide outage, which left more than 10 million Australians cut off from phone and internet services.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin was called in to lead a Senate inquiry into what went wrong on Wednesday, November 8, when customers across Australia woke up to no service.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland took calls from journalists from about 5 a.m. and headed to a press conference early in an attempt to allay public concerns.

But the Optus CEO himself did not speak publicly about the crisis for several more hours, calling ABC Radio via WhatsApp shortly after 10.30am for a short interview on the matter.

She faced strong backlash for appearing to go missing during those crucial early hours, but has now told the inquiry she had good reason for the decision.

“Before I spoke, I wanted to make sure we could at least rule out the possibility of malicious activity,” she said.

“Once our cyber specialists ruled this out, I began advocating the issue publicly on behalf of my team.”

Ms Bayer Rosmarin said the decision was twofold: she also worked closely with her team to make decisions about the call centres, which had also crashed, and whether or not it was wise to open physical stores during the outage.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, chair of the committee overseeing the Optus investigation, said customers have the right to know whether they can continue to have confidence in the operator.

Last Wednesday’s 12-hour outage affected Optus’ entire telephone and internet network and prevented some calls to emergency numbers.

It was the second major crisis for the telecoms provider in the past 12 months after a cyber security breach compromised customers’ personal data.

Ahead of the Senate hearing, the Australian Financial Review reported that Ms Bayer Rosmarin was considering her position.

Last Wednesday’s 12-hour outage affected Optus’ entire telephone and internet network and prevented some calls to emergency numbers

The CEO, who has held the top job at Optus since April 2020, could leave as early as next week, the publication said.

Asked whether Ms Bayer Rosmarin should resign, Senator Hanson-Young said this was a question for the board and CEO.

‘But I have to say that I think this was handled horribly. “It is not the first time under this leadership that Optus has failed to speak to customers and tell the public what is going on,” she said.

Optus has blamed the outage on a routine software upgrade, which saw changes to routing information flow through multiple levels of the telecoms network.

During the investigation, Ms Bayer Rosmarin said: ‘The reality is that our network should have dealt with this change, but this time it did not.

‘We effectively carried out a hard reboot of the network – this started around 10.30am, with the vast majority of customers restored by 2pm and 99 per cent by 4pm.

“The actions we took were a brute force resuscitation of the network. We had not yet identified the source of the problem, and while the crisis was over for our customers at 4:00 PM, it was not over for our teams, who had to immediately shift focus to what had happened to the network to ensure that ensure that this would not happen. happen again.

This work took many days… I would like to acknowledge and thank the team for their tireless recovery efforts under enormous pressure.”

The CEO said she “believes with all her heart” that she and her team have done everything possible to “provide timely, accurate and credible information”, but accepts that more can always be done.

“There is no doubt that the outage itself initially negatively impacted our ability to communicate more effectively with each other, our consumers, the media and government in the early hours of Wednesday morning.”

Ms Bayer Rosmarin revealed she had not spoken to the relevant minister – Ms Rowland – until 8.30am, around four hours after the outage started.

At the time, she had no reason to believe that Triple-zero calls were not going through because the network is designed to route emergency calls through other networks in the event of an outage.