Kelly Bayer Rosmarin defends outage described as ‘clown show’

The Optus chief says a fault caused a cascading failure across its networks that sparked chaos across the economy.

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer-Rosmarin denied the suggestion the outage stemmed from major network upgrade. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Optus has finally revealed the root cause of a major outage which took 10.2 million of its customers - more than one third of the nation - offline on Wednesday, unable to make calls, send texts or access the internet.

The company’s chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin described the fault as one of “multiple layers” in which a network event triggered a “cascading failure”.

“In common with major global telecommunication networks, the Optus network is designed with multiple layers of fall back and redundancy. At the heart of this is a modern intelligent router network developed with the world’s leading vendors,” she said.

“Despite this, a network event yesterday triggered a cascading failure which resulted in the shutdown of services to our customers.”

Ms Bayer Rosmarin said Optus engineers had conducted a thorough investigation, and had learned from the exercise.
“Our engineers are investigating thoroughly and we will learn from this outage and continue to improve. We welcome, and intend to cooperate fully with, the Government investigations,” she said.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin had previously said she would reveal the cause of the national outage, only “if it’s relevant”.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin - who is facing the second reputational disaster under her leadership after last year’s cyber attack - also defended her communication with customers, which Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry boss Andrew McKellar branded a “clown show”.

“We’ve communicated very openly and transparently. When we have a full root cause analysis, if it’s relevant, we will share that and be forthcoming,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said.

“But with customers not being connected to our network, they can’t always receive messages from us.

“What I can say is, it’s a very technical network engineering issue.”

Pedestrians walk past a security guard standing outside an Optus outlet in Sydney on November 9. Picture: David Gray/AFP

Ms Bayer Rosmarin denied the suggestion the outage stemmed from major network upgrade overnight on Tuesday - as relayed to The Australian by telco industry insiders. “I can tell you that is not true,” she said.

Optus initially issued a two sentence statement early on Wednesday. Ms Bayer Rosmarin then fronted the media, dialling into ABC radio via WhatsApp, seven hours after Optus’s phone and internet services collapsed.

She opted to contact individual radio stations and journalists, rather than hold an open press conference - a strategy she also defended but said she was “open to any views”.

“I really don’t think that that’s necessary,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said when asked if she would hold a media conference.

“We’ve been extremely forthcoming with information and we’ve put a notice out straight away. We’ve kept our messaging very simple and easy to digest.

“As a critical infrastructure provider, we aim to give our customers a service that works 100 per cent of the time every day of the year 24/7, and on most days we succeed. We didn’t succeed in achieving that, but it’s a very rare occurrence. Our job is to make sure we learn from it and keep it as an extremely rare occurrence.”

But Australian Chamber of Commerce chief executive Andrew McKellar labelled the way in which Optus communicated to customers amid a major outage a “clown show”. He said small business customers should be entitled to some compensation as many went the entire day without the ability to trade.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief Andrew McKellar has described the outage as a fiasco. Picture: Martin Ollman/Getty Images

“For many of them, they were without their payment system (and) their order systems were down. They completely impacted,” he told ABC News.

“I think it has been a fiasco from that point of view and clearly this is a major issue that Optus has to respond appropriately to, particularly for those smaller customers.

Optus vice president of regulatory and public affairs Andrew Sheridan is also yet rule out that idea of compensation.

“Of course, we do also want to recognise the challenging day that our customers have had and thank them for their patience,” he said.

“And so we’re now working on how do we recognise them for that, and that’s something that we’ll work on very quickly.”