Double standard at play in CrowdStrike outage

Former Optus CEO Kelly Bayer-Rosmarin was flayed by politicians over its national outage. But if you’re a man in charge of a US tech firm, the government takes a ‘nothing to see here’ stance.

Former Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned after appearing at a Senate inquiry into Optus’s national outage.

The Albanese government has displayed hypocrisy in its response to the world’s biggest tech outage, which is arguably a thousand times worse than Optus’s meltdown last year.

A software upgrade from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike sparked widespread chaos across the globe, crippling banks, hospitals, retailers and airlines. It is expected to cost businesses billions of dollars.

CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz.

The government’s response so far has been measured and focused at getting the economy back online. It hasn’t called for chief executive George Kurtz’s head or for him to explain why a company – which has more than $4.2m worth of government contracts – pushed out a faulty update to its clients.

Getting the economy back on track should and must be the government’s priority.

But it’s the opposite to how it handled the cyber attack that hit Optus in late 2022 and then its national meltdown 13 months later, which ultimately cost the telco’s former CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin her job.

Home Affairs Minister Claire O’Neil was scathing over Optus’s culpability, suggesting the cyber security requirements placed on large telcos were not “fit for purpose”.

Home Affairs, Clare O'Neil’s response to the CrowdStrike outage has been measured.

O’Neil suffered a backlash from the business community, leading to a more tempered response when Medibank suffered a cyber attack weeks later. But tempers flared again, in the aftermath of Optus’s outage. The government supported a push from the Greens for a Senate inquiry.

Rather than a disciplined mission to extract the facts of what went wrong, the inquiry descended into the equivalent of a kangaroo court, with Bayer Rosmarin basted and roasted as the sacrificial lamb.

Labor Senator Karen Grogan slammed Bayer Rosmarin’s evidence as “fluffy”. Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said her communication was “lousy”. Political theatre in search of sound bite rather than the key facts. Bayer Rosmarin responded with stoicism before announcing her resignation the next business day.

On one hand, it can be viewed that our political class has a problem with women. Remember Scott Morrison thundering in parliament that if former

Former Australia Post chief executive Christine Holgate.

Australia Post boss Christine Holgate didn’t stand aside over the Cartier watch scandal ‘she can go’.

But it’s easy to forget that it was Labor that pulled the trigger on Holgate, with Morrison walking into the political trap. Questioning from ALP Senator Kimberley Kitching in Senate estimates revealed that Holgate has spent about $20,000 on gifting Australia Post execs watches in recognition of securing multimillion contracts with the big banks to keep local post offices afloat.

Then Kitching’s death in 2022 sparked a fresh gender drama in federal politics.

An investigation by The Australian uncovered a long pattern of hostility and being frozen out by members of Kitching’s own team, including senior ALP women Penny Wong and Kristina Keneally.

But when it comes to the treatment of a middle-aged man a world away, it seems that there is nothing to see here. George Kurtz had a stellar reputation before the outage and has done a mighty job preventing incursions from nefarious players on cloud computing networks, and has been working with CrowdStrike’s customers to get them back online.

It’s a pity our political class don’t hold Australian executives in the same esteem. After all, we need to attract all the local tech talent we can if we are to build our own IT sovereign capability and transition to a so-called smart economy.