Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has grilled Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin on how she discovered the network was down across Australia.
Ms Rosmarin told the committee that she, much like other Optus customers, woke up the morning of the outage and could not contact her team to determine what the problem was.
The Optus CEO was pressed on what sort of backup the company has to ensure its leadership team can still communicate during an outage.
Ms Rosmarin explained some key members had extra sims on hand but acknowledged the system needed to be improved.
“You’re the second largest communications company in the country and you couldn’t communicate,” Ms Hanson-Young said.
“But some of your people have the ability to switch SIMS … most Australians don’t have that. You had insurance for yourselves, but your customer didn’t.
“Do you think that is a problem?”