After a week of cautious public appearances guided by pre-prepared talking points, Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin arrived at the doors of Parliament House to face a barrage of questions her media managers had no oversight of.
Entrances are usually nothing to write home about, but her staffers were quick to cover the lens of the awaiting Channel 9 camera on stake-out duty. It was the first sign that things were about to go from bad to worse.
Her appearance at the Senate inquiry set up with the specific purpose to forensically examine last week’s disastrous Optus outage and the telco’s response since — or lack thereof — was meant to be a time for straight-talking answers.
Bayer Rosmarin said as much herself, using her opening statement to tell the senators that she welcomed the opportunity to “answer all of your questions as openly as we can”, “clarify some misconceptions” and be “frank about some of our mistakes”. Plenty of disgruntled Optus customers would argue it’s the least the boss of the nation’s second-biggest telco could do after they were disconnected from the world without warning.
But the questions hit thick and fast and it didn’t take long for a first stumble on the public stage.
Optus and its parent company Singtel have spent much of the past 72 hours playing the blame game after Singtel was revealed to be the mysterious “third party” that caused the outage.
On Thursday, it descended into a full-blown family disagreement when Singtel refuted Optus’s claims that it was its software upgrade gone wrong that left 10 million Australians in the dark, saying the upgrade wasn’t “the root cause” of the outage.
Then Optus changed its tune, saying Singtel wasn’t rejecting Optus’s claims, but it was instead a display of solidarity. The lines sent out to reporters were that Singtel’s position “is not contrary to ours”.
That’s the exact misconception Bayer Rosmarin was wanting to clear up during her time in Canberra, telling senators that all the relevant people across all the relevant divisions in Optus and Singtel had signed off on the statement and there was nothing to see here, there’s no love lost. Besides, Cisco is actually at fault, not Optus or Singtel — or so their submission suggests.
After admitting that 228 Optus customers were unable to connect to triple-0 during the outage, Bayer Rosmarin was quick to dismiss concerns. Fear not, she said, we performed welfare checks on them as soon as the network was back up and running. By the point Optus’s services were fully restored, 14 hours had passed.
Bayer Rosmarin wasn’t the only person whose answers didn’t seem to cut the mustard.
Her offsider and boss of the telco’s networks, Lambo Kanagaratnam said Optus was only “pretty confident” that the beleaguered telco hadn’t been hit by a cyber attack at 10:20am — some six hours after the outage was first reported. Never mind that Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil had spent the morning telling news outlets there was no indication one had occurred.
Putting a dollar value on compensation
Questions then turned to what millions of customers and thousands of small business owners wanted to hear: what is Optus going to do to make amends, apart from 200GB of extra data when most of their services already come with an unlimited option? What are you doing for small businesses who lost a day of trade? How do you apologise enough to the customers who stood by you after their data was stolen from you last year?
Bayer Rosmarin had the answer on her phone, confidently telling senators that 8,500 of its small business customers had been in touch, and they had been discussing compensation worth around $430,000 with $63,000 “applied”.
She pointed out that she didn’t like to use the word compensation either, saying it was more about “assessing the specific scenario” of each customer to do the right thing by them.
It’s not clear whether Optus has stumped up the $63,000 in cash, or it’s the value of “in-kind” services it’s provided, but the company has until next Friday to tell the inquiry.
For a company that just reported $141 million in pre-tax and interest profits over the past six months, and whose parent Singtel made a net profit in that period of close to $1.6 billion, aggrieved customers may feel there’s a fair bit more in the kitty to help cover some of their losses.
Then there was the peculiar disclosure that Optus is giving its fixed internet customers a free speed upgrade to the NBN until the end of the year, which was also included in its written submission to the inquiry.
Optus’s own website says that NBN speed upgrades start on December 1 and will last through the month.
As if Optus doesn’t have enough headaches right now, they could be hit with another, should they have provided false evidence to the Senate.
Waiting, seeing, hoping
For a company in the business of communications, many were left wondering whether the message Bayer Rosmarin sent on Friday was that Optus still doesn’t get it.
How does $63,000 or 200GB compare to 10 million Australians being left in the dark for up to 14 hours, tens of thousands of businesses losing the better part of a whole day’s trade, and hundreds of people being unable to call Triple-0 in an emergency?
The fact of the matter is customers have few other options than hope Optus does the right thing with compensation.
Getting any money through the telecommunications ombudsman takes time, evidence and isn’t guaranteed. Class actions take even longer to get off the ground, and longer still for there to be a resolution, if there is a successful one at all.
Customers can always walk out on the company, but each of Australia’s other two main telco networks have also experienced widespread outages in the past.
Optus has offered plenty of excuses and apologies since it went dark, but would it afford most of its customers the same leniency if they failed to pay their bills on time?
You’d think being hit with one of the biggest cyber attacks in Australian corporate history or witnessing Qantas’s public fall from grace would teach Optus a few more lessons in handling a massive tech failure.
Perhaps, finally, the public scrutiny of the Senate will force the system reboot Optus so desperately seems to need.
