Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin considers stepping down

Last week’s outage, which has raised concerns over the resilience of Australia’s critical infrastructure, has sparked Senate and parliamentary inquiries.

Speaking ahead of the hearing, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young indicated Ms Bayer Rosmarin would come under intense scrutiny.

“The Optus CEO has questions to answer tomorrow and the Senate will demand honest answers,” she said.

Ms Bayer Rosmarin is expected to acknowledge some of the criticism directed at the telco group.

Senator Hanson-Young is expected to ask how many people were unable to dial 000 during the 14-hour outage, and whether the outage was caused by Optus putting profits ahead of the public interest.

“Why did Optus fail so dismally to communicate to the public and their customers? How can the tokenistic offer of 200 gigabytes of data possibly constitute fair compensation for those who were unable to work, contact loved ones or go about their daily lives,” Senator Hanson-Young said.

“I will be asking what happened and what Optus is doing to ensure this kind of catastrophic failure does not happen again.”

Politicians and customers were furious with Ms Bayer Rosmarin’s and the company’s slow response to the outage, which occurred just after 4am on November 8, with Communications Minister Michelle Rowland citing the outage as a cause of “great anxiety” for people and businesses.

Class action lawsuit

Ms Bayer Rosmarin initially said on the day of the outage that it was too complex to explain, sparking criticism from crisis management experts who say she should have been more forthcoming. It took days for Optus to provide information on the cause – which it attributed to network disruption following a software upgrade. Even then it provided only limited details.

The telecoms group’s brand had only recently begun to recover from last year’s cyberattack, which led to the personal information of 10,200 customers – including passport, driver’s licence and Medicare numbers – being posted online. Optus was criticised for its poor communications at the time and for not being transparent enough with government agencies.

A class action lawsuit filed against Optus has been trying to obtain a report written by Deloitte into the causes of the attack. A Federal Court judge last week criticised Optus for keeping the report secret, although the company is expected to keep fighting not to release information in the report.

Debate about the manner of the outage has continued to rage this week. Singtel, Optus’ parent, on Thursday said its Singtel Internet Exchange – or STiX – was the trigger rather than the cause for last week’s outage.

Optus has previously confirmed that a software update from its “international peering network”, a reference to StiX, had triggered problems that cascaded through its network. The Australian Financial Review understand that failsafe routers incorrectly activating in Optus’ networks, after the software upgrade, were the root cause of the nationwide outage.

Root cause

“The cause of the outage was that the software upgrade subsequently propagated in Optus’ network to a point that it triggered the failsafe for the routers. The settings on those routers should have been at levels to take the upgrade,” a source with knowledge of the situation said.

STiX said it had planned for a routine software upgrade on one of its routers in Singapore early on November 8 and notified all affected customers, including Optus.

“During the upgrade, data traffic was routed to other points of presence on the STiX network, and back into customers’ networks,” a Singtel spokesman said.

“The STiX upgrade was completed within 20 minutes, and all its customers’ routers that were connected to it, including Optus’, were up and running.

“We are aware that Optus experienced a network outage after the upgrade when a significant increase in addresses being propagated through their network triggered preset failsafes. However, the upgrade was not the root cause.”

An Optus spokesperson said Singtel’s position on the root cause was “not contrary” to the Optus position.

“In our earlier statements, we had clarified that the root cause was not the external software upgrade but an increase in addresses being propagated through our network that triggered a failsafe mechanism,” an Optus spokeswoman said.

“The affected routers then disconnected from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves. We are making changes to our network to ensure it will not happen again.”

Friday’s hearing, which starts at 9am, will be held by the environment and communications committee. Liberal Senator for NSW Hollie Hughes and Nationals Senator Ross Caddell are expected to attend.