Gladys Berejiklian has been floated as a potential candidate to replace the Optus chief who is facing mounting criticism over the telco’s nationwide outage this week.
The second-largest telecommunications provider went offline on Wednesday, leaving 10 million customers without internet or the ability to make calls for almost 14 hours.
Optus has repeatedly apologised for the meltdown and on Thursday offered 200GBs of data to reward customers for their “loyalty” ahead of the Christmas holidays.
However, the compensation has been slammed by many as an “insult”, arguing it was not enough, especially for small business owners who could not use EFTPOS machines and had to either delay opening their store or close it, losing out on revenue.
There have been suggestions Ms Berejiklian, the former premier who was in charge of NSW for almost five years, could replace incumbent CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.
The ex politician decided to step down as the state’s Liberal leader in late 2021 after ICAC announced an investigation into her relationship with former MP Daryl Maguire.
Ms Berejiklian then found a new role as the Managing Director of Enterprise, Business and Institutional at Optus more than four months later.
Sky News Australia host Peter Stefanovic questioned tech expert Trevor Long whether the 53-year-old would “move on” Ms Bayer Rosmarin ” to run the company eventually”.
“She’s the obvious candidate internally,” Mr Long said, adding another likely applicant would be Clive Dickens, Optus’ VP of Television, Content and Product Development.
The EFTM editor pointed to the former premier’s communication with NSW residents during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when she held daily press conferences to announce infection figures and provided updates to restrictions as another notch on her belt to take the top job at Optus.
Optus blamed a “network event” which triggered a “cascading failure” leaving millions of its customers around the country inconvenienced.
Ms Berejiklian also tried to calm disgruntled customers by saying she was “deeply sorry” to business customers “of all sizes”.
Ms Bayer Rosmarin will be forced to front a Senate inquiry to explain what happened on Wednesday, with the government and regulator launching investigations.
Optus is owned by Singtel. Its delegation from Singapore were in Australia this week when the outage made headline news.
Mr Long suggested the board would be assessing whether the current Optus chief could remain in the top job following the outage and the telco’s data hack in September 2022.
The personal information of 10 million customers were compromised, with at least 2.1 million ID numbers exposed in the breach, 900,000 of which were expired.
Up to 150,000 passport and 50,000 Medicare card numbers were stolen, with the personal information of 10,200 customers posted online.
The incident also happened when Ms Bayer Rosmarin was in charge. At the time she pledged to “rebuilding trust with customers” and appointed consultants Deloitte to conduct a review of its security systems following the cyberattack.
“I think they would have to be looking at this (the Optus outage). And if customer numbers drop, that’s exactly why they’ll make the change (to Ms Berejiklian),” Mr Long said about the former premier’s potential accession to the top job at the telco.
Optus reached out to customers on Friday reiterating its apology saying it was “deeply sorry” and thanked them for their “understanding” while it was fixing the issues.
It reminded customers to take advantage of the free 200GBs of data – available from Monday – that can be added to their service until the end of the year.
“We’re committed to working tirelessly to provide the value you deserve and the great network experience you expect from us,” it said.
Customers were left fuming on Thursday when the telco announced the data package, as they believed it does not sufficiently compensate them.
“Optus offers data to commercial, citizen users as compensation. What about damages to infrastructure uperations- hospitals schools transport? Inadequate response- connectivity is essential infrastructure,” one posted to social media platform X.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority will also investigate Optus’ outage for the barrier it presented for those trying to access Triple-Zero services.
