‘Today was a bad day’: Optus CEO apologises for mass outage

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is facing pressure to explain why millions of people were left without critical communication services for more than 12 hours on Wednesday as she implored customers to stick with the company.

The outage, which began at 4am AEDT and lasted until around 6pm on Wednesday, affected about 10 million Optus customers and around 400,000 businesses, and crippled transport systems, hospitals and government departments across the country.

An Optus shop in Melbourne notifies customers of a major outage around Australia.Credit: Max Walden

It caused extensive delays across Melbourne’s rail network and at least 11 hospitals in Victoria lost phone services.

At the Royal Women’s Hospital, Emily Neophytou was unable to contact her husband about their daughter Evelyn, who is in the neonatal intensive-care unit. “It was distressing,” she said.

While Optus on Wednesday night was yet to identify the root cause of the outage, Bayer Rosmarin said the “technical network issue” had been resolved, and the network was back up and running.

She has been criticised for her handling of two major crises at Australia’s second-largest telecommunications company, but sidestepped questions about whether she would be staying in the top job.

“What I’m focused on is doing the best that I can for customers and almost every other day than today, that’s what we did,” Bayer Rosmarin told this masthead.

“And so we’re very disappointed that we let our customers down today. I can assure you the team and me are completely dedicated to doing our best for customers and making sure that this remains an extremely rare occurrence.”

‘Today was a bad day but every other day we deliver on that promise for our customers, and we will continue to.’

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin

Bayer Rosmarin urged Optus customers to stay with telco, which she said had been a “real customer champion”.

“We strive every day to give our customers the best possible value for money, a great network experience and unique features that they can’t get anywhere else, and we will continue to do that day in and day out,” she said.

“Today was a bad day but every other day we deliver on that promise for our customers, and we will continue to.”

The Communications Minister, Michelle Rowland, lashed Optus, telling the company to “step up” its customer engagement as people were “hungry for information”.

“I think Optus needs to make sure [they] communicate with people because as I understand it, this started in the early hours of this morning,” she said at a Blacktown press conference.

“We’re now at 11 o’clock and for a lot of people who are trying to get on with their day and their business, this is absolutely vital that they get back to normality.”

The Greens have called for a Senate inquiry into the outage, which the party hopes to have support across the political spectrum.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said there was a need to understand how Australia’s second-largest telecommunications service let this failure happen.

“This is not a small matter and the parliament will have to look at what Optus can and should be doing, what they knew, how this failure happened and there needs to be … consequences for this type of outage,” she said.

“It is not good enough for this big company, Optus, to simply phone it in through a radio interview this morning, rather than fronting the customers, talking to the press and telling Australians what’s going on.”

Bayer Rosmarin, a former CBA banking executive who took the top job at Optus in 2020, said calls for a Senate inquiry were “really premature”.

“Every telco has outages, it’s happened before and it will happen again,” she said. “We’ve restored [the network] in the same day, and we will get all the learnings from that to make sure that it doesn’t happen again and remains an extremely rare occurrence.”

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has apologised for the nationwide outage. Credit: Natalie Boog

Wednesday’s outage not only paralysed the nation’s telecommunication networks, but prompted long queues at Telstra and Vodafone retail stores as customers looked to shift providers.

It also affected other providers using the Optus network, including Amaysim, Vaya, Aussie Broadband, Moose Mobile, Coles Mobile, Spintel, Southern Phone, Gomo and Dodo Mobile.

Landline phones on the Optus network were unable to connect to triple zero emergency services, as were some mobile phones on the Optus network. “If Optus customers need to call emergency services, we suggest finding a family member or neighbour with an alternative device,” it said.

The issue also affected eftpos terminals on the Optus network, hospitals, and Uber drivers who were unable to operate the app.

The outage came a year after Optus suffered a massive data breach, in which more than 9 million current and former customers had their records accessed.

Optus is owned by Singaporean parent company Singtel, whose executive board has been visiting Australia this week. Shares in Singtel fell by nearly 5 per cent on the Singapore Exchange on Wednesday.

“Obviously I’ve kept them fully updated and they’ve been extremely supportive,” Bayer Rosmarin said of the Singtel board. “They’re experienced in running telcos all around the world. They understand the realities of dealing with critical infrastructure, and we’ve had nothing but support.”

Telecommunications industry ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said Optus was too late to contact her about the incident, but a “growing volume” of Optus customers had contacted her office throughout the day to end their contracts.

“The initial contacts we had were very much around people being frustrated by the lack of information,” she said.

While Bayer Rosmarin denied claims of poor communication, shadow communications minister David Coleman said the telco must explain how the loss of access to essential services occurred.

Ramsay Health Care, which operates 73 private hospitals and day surgeries across Australia, said its phone lines were down and posted on Facebook to direct people to use contact forms on hospital websites instead.

Melbourne’s Northern Health district also took to social media to inform patients that all phone lines into its hospital campuses had been affected.

“This includes phone lines into Northern Hospital Epping, Broadmeadows Hospital, Bundoora Centre, Craigieburn Centre, Kilmore District Hospital, and Victorian Virtual Emergency Department,” it wrote.

“We apologise for any inconvenience.”

NetBlocks, a watchdog organisation that monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the Internet, said metrics show Optus mobile services went down across much of Australia about 4am AEDT.

Abraham Golski, who operates Abe’s Coffee Supply in Sydney’s Inner West had to delay opening his cafe on Wednesday morning due to the outage affecting eftpos.

“I had to find out searching on the internet, [Optus] didn’t send a notice, message or email,” he said.“I cannot accept card payments, how frustrating.”

One Optus customer, Annie, told ABC Radio she first became aware of the issue just after 6am when her cat woke her up because the Wi-Fi enabled cat feeder had failed to dispense breakfast.

International roaming customers are also being hit by the outage.

Optus user Kim Boey is in Greece and said her roaming stopped working about 5pm Greece time.

“I am trying to turn off overseas roaming and two hours later, it is still not completed. It is 9.45pm and it’s still not turned off,” she said.

NetBlocks said metrics show Optus mobile services are down across much of Australia, leaving millions of customers unable to make calls or access internet since early morning.

Another Optus customer, Daniel, an anaesthetist, said he was on-call overnight for emergency operations and noticed the network was down about 3am.

“I was unable to make phone calls or use the internet,” he said.

Optus apologises to customers following the cyberattack and data breach in 2022.Credit: Nikki Short

Additional reporting by Paul Sakkal.

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