The telco’s under-fire boss fronted a Senate inquiry into the failure that left millions of Australians without mobile or broadband coverage for almost 14 hours, facing questions about the cause of the crash, as well as compensation, back-up plans, and her future.
Bayer Rosmarin told the inquiry that, while the emergency service should have worked during the outage, a total of 228 calls were unable to go through last Wednesday.
The telco has conducted welfare checks with all 228 customers and they are all “okay”, she said, but shifted blame for those failed calls.
“We don’t manage the triple zero system. It’s a very complex system that involves all the carriers,” Bayer Rosmarin said.
“It involves the device manufacturers… we’re still investigating that and we’re really happy that the ACMA has called an investigation into why this did not work.”
Earlier in the hearing, she revealed she had told Communications Minister Michelle Rowland that the triple zero network would be unaffected in a phone call a little over four hours into the outage.
“When I spoke to the minister at that time we had every reason to believe that the triple zero system would work as designed and that all calls would go through on alternative networks,” she said.
Bayer Rosmarin also admitted “our performance was not acceptable” during the crash.
“We understand the intrinsic essential role we play in Australian lives and we take our responsibilities to provide continuous connectivity seriously,” she told the hearing.
“As a business, we are nothing without our customers who put their faith in us. And it is indisputable that on that day, our performance was not acceptable. We let you down and for that I am deeply sorry.
“I want to make it clear that we have taken immediate and ongoing steps to rectify any shortcomings. And today I want to assure you, my teams and our customers that we are committed to regaining trust.”
Optus boss dodges questions about stepping down
“I’m sure you can appreciate my entire focus has been on restoring the outage issue,” she said when asked by Sarah Henderson if she intended to resign, adding “it has not been a time to be thinking about myself”.
When asked whether the AFR report was correct or not, Bayer Rosmarin said she hadn’t “seen any reports today, I’ve been preparing for being here” and later added she would “take on board” a suggestion that it was time for new leadership at the telco.
Telco ‘didn’t have a plan’ for such a large outage
Appearing alongside Bayer Rosmarin, Optus’ network managing director Lambo Kanagaratnam admitted the telco was unprepared for an outage of last week’s scale.
“We didn’t have a plan in place for that specific scale of outage,” he said.
“It was unexpected. We have high levels of redundancy and it’s not something that we expect to happen.
“It’s certainly something that we commit to learning from.”
The massive outage last Wednesday hit individuals and businesses, even affecting health and government services.
Bayer Rosmarin revealed today it has also paid out $36,000 in compensation, although couldn’t confirm whether that was in cash or in services like the bonus data.
She said some 8500 customers have applied for compensation in claims adding up to around $430,000.
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Optus earlier this week revealed the cause of the outage.
“These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these.
“This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.”
The Department of Home Affairs had previously ruled out a cyber-attack as the cause.
