A day in the life of CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin during the Optus outage

The Optus boss learned of the telco’s national outage only about three hours afterward, and of the full impact an hour after Optus had issued its first statement.

It was not until 3½ hours after Optus’s entire network collapsed that chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin realised the telco was battling a crisis – and among her first actions was calling in the lawyers.

“When I got up in the morning, I could see that my phone wasn’t working and so I immediately decided to head into the office,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin recalled.

When she hopped in her Tesla just before 7am, her phone still showed “SOS”, leaving her without contact with the rest of her team.

“At that time I thought I’d call the team on the way cause it’s quite unusual for both the data and voice networks which are run separately to be down together. Once I was in the car and could not call the team I realised that it must be a more serious outage.”

The trip would have taken the Optus boss more than 30 minutes from her multimillion-dollar home in Sydney’s ritzy eastern suburb of Vaucluse.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin was not entirely cut off from the digital world, The Weekend Australian understands, with the manufacturer of her electric car having partnered with another telco for its SIM cards, which would have allowed her to listen to music on Spotify and use other apps such as maps without hassle. This would have suggested the outage was limited to Optus.

When Ms Bayer Rosmarin did arrive at Optus, the first thing she did was head to the network control centre, she told a Senate inquiry on Friday. And within 10 minutes, the first crisis meeting involving the CEO was held.

More than an hour earlier, the company had issued its first public statement via Facebook and Twitter, not on the Optus main page but its customer service page. Media inquiries had begun to flow through since 4.27am.

At a similar time to the meeting, the first contact between Communications Minister Michelle Rowland and Optus took place, with Ms Bayer Rosmarin contacting the minister separately after 8am.

“I called a crisis, and we had a crisis meeting from 7.45am until 8.30am,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin told the inquiry on Friday. Joining the crisis call was Optus’s legal team but Ms Bayer Rosmarin says she did not receive any legal advice during that meeting, after which she called Ms Rowland, who’s office had been fielding calls from journalists since 5am and was becoming increasingly frustrated.

Kelly Bayer Rosmarin at the Senate inquiry. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

“I was given no advice by my legal team to say or not say anything. And all the interviews I did, I was not on a script. I am the CEO. I’m accountable. I took that accountability,” she said.

While Optus mobile services were down, there was still internet at the Macquarie Park office, which uses different routers to the Cisco routers that went offline following a Singtel update at 4am. Between 8.30am and 10.40am, the Optus media team updated its statement four times before Ms Bayer Rosmarin conducted her first interview of the day with the ABC. That interview was conducted via WhatsApp.

Shortly after, about 29 per cent of Optus Radio Access Network (RAN) sites had been restored. The telco had deployed approximately 150 engineers, technicians and field technicians to Optus sites to repair its network. Those in the field were supported by a further 200 online.

By 11am, 56 per cent of RAN sites were up again, growing to 83 per cent by 1pm and 98 per cent by 2pm. By 3.30pm, RAN sites were 99.72 per cent restored but still about 9000 Optus NBN customers were without internet. At 4pm on Wednesday, Optus declared the outage was officially over.

At the Senate inquiry on Friday, Ms Bayer Rosmarin said it was “unusual” for a chief executive to front the public in a company crisis. “The public would expect that my focus is on working with the teams to resolve the issue,” she said.

“So our communications team was giving updates.”

Originally published as A day in the life of CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin during the Optus outage