Sydney, Australia, Nov 20 (EFE).- The chief executive officer of Australian telecommunications giant Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, stepped down following an outage that left 10 million people incommunicado on Nov. 8, the parent company, Singtel, announced Monday.
“On Friday I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate to expand on the cause of the network outage and how Optus recovered and responded. I was also able to communicate Optus’ commitment to restore trust and continue to serve customers. Having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward,” Bayer Rosmarin said in the company’s statement.
Singtel Group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon acknowledged Rosmarin for her “leadership, commitment and hard work” after being appointed at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic but recognized the need to “regain customer trust and confidence” following the outage.
The outage at Optus, which faces hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation claims, occurred as a result of changes to routing information following a routine software upgrade at one of the Singtel internet exchanges.
The upgrade caused key routers to disconnect from the central network to protect themselves from an information overload so that these devices had to be reconnected or rebooted physically in some cases.
The outage affected more than 38.4 percent of Australia’s population – as well as some 400,000 businesses and government offices, hospitals and transport services -, who were unable to make or receive calls, send texts or access the internet or carry out banking or payment operations.
In 2022, Optus suffered a massive cyber attack in which the personal information of almost 10 million customers, including passport data, postal addresses, phone numbers and emails, was leaked. EFE
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