January
ASX reveals cause of embarrassing outage
It will make a $1 million goodwill payment to stockbrokers who relied on the CHESS system. ASIC’s chairman says he is “very concerned” about the incident.
December 2024
ASX says it will trade as normal on Monday, narrowly avoiding disaster
The market operator had been hit by technical issues on Friday which meant that trades could not be settled. Staff worked through the weekend to fix the issue.
ASX scrambles to fix CHESS settlements outage as traders fume
At lunchtime on Friday as many stockbrokers went to end-of-year lunches, the market operator said its batch payments had failed, threatening a cash flow crunch.
Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram services start to return after outages
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp appear to be recovering after they suffered major outages.
September 2024
Why competition laws could increase the risk of blue screen attacks
We should beware of one-size-fits-all technology policies that could open smart devices to the third-party vulnerabilities that caused the CrowdStrike outage.
July 2024
Why business is left helpless when big tech stuffs up
Experts say there is little most organisations can do to avoid future calamities like the CrowdStrike outage, but Australia’s emergency responses are improving.
CrowdStrike failure raises billion-dollar compensation question
Insurers could bear the brunt of costly fallout from the global IT outage on Friday, as techies at companies worked over the weekend to get services back up and running.
What is CrowdStrike? The IT giant behind the global meltdown
Flights were cancelled, broadcasters went off air, trains didn’t run and medical procedures were delayed around the world.
December 2023
Ex-chief Kelly Bayer Rosmarin severs final ties with Optus
The former chief executive stayed for the transition to acting chief executive of Michael Venter, who is also the company’s chief financial officer.
November 2023
‘We didn’t have a plan’: Optus admits it was caught out
In a make-or-break appearance for Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, senators failed to land a knockout blow, but gleaned some damaging admissions.
Optus says payouts for mass outage would set a precedent
Optus has laid out its defences to criticism of its network outage, as CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin considers her future.
ASIC warns of ‘alarming’ holes in business’ cyber defences
ASIC is alarmed at corporate Australia’s lack of preparedness for digital threats, while experts say it will be costly for telcos to comply with new cyber laws.
Optus faces review, compensation claims amid earnings slide
CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin and her executive team have been blasted for leaving politicians to do the company’s crisis communications after Wednesday’s national outage.
The Optus outage wasn’t a hack. Here’s why we’re screwed if it had been
Optus’ chaotic outage wasn’t cyber warfare, and that’s lucky. We saw that we can’t function if one part of our digital lives falls over.
‘Cash only’ and old-fashioned IOUs: how businesses dealt without Optus
Thousands of companies and enterprises were disrupted by the outage that left millions of Australians without phone or internet services for close to nine hours.
Optus CEO says ‘no soundbite’ to explain phone outage chaos
Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said the cause of a national outage of phone and internet services was too ‘technical’ to explain.
September 2023
Square payment outage raises red flags at the Reserve Bank
Block-owned Square does not report data on reliability and outages to the RBA. That might change after its payments system went down on Friday.
May 2023
Telstra mobile phone users suffer 11-hour outage
Mobile phone users in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide began having difficulties at 10pm on Monday. The problem wasn’t fixed until 9am on Tuesday.
October 2022
ASX still working on automation for outages
The market operator says it will deliver another consultation paper exploring ways to automate services during outages.
RBA restores payment system after major outage
A failure after a software update involving its virtual servers had frozen money transfers worth almost a billion dollars at big banks across the country.