Police and security personnel have pushed reporters out of the way as the Optus CEO left a Senate inquiry.
Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin faced the parliamentary grilling on Friday, defending her company’s handling of the largest telecommunications outage in the nation’s history.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Reporters pushed out of the way as Optus CEO left Senate inquiry.
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Bayer Rosmarin was whisked out of parliament by half a dozen police officers and security guards — who prevented reporters, including 7NEWS Federal Politics Reporter Isabelle Mullen, from questioning her as she left.
A 12-hour network event last Wednesday left Australian individuals and businesses unable to make calls, access the internet or complete transactions.
In response, the company apologised, and customers — including businesses that lost thousands of dollars in sales — were offered 200GB of extra data, or free data on weekends if they were on prepaid plans, as a “gesture of thanks for their ongoing support and patience”.
Bayer Rosmarin opened her address to a Senate inquiry on Friday by acknowledging the pain of her customers.
“While I believe wholeheartedly that we did everything we could to provide timely, accurate and credible information, I acknowledge that there is always more we could have done,” she said.
“Beyond restoring our network, our focus now is restoring trust.”
But the wrath of senators quickly began to fall on the Optus boss.
“You provide a service to more than 10 million people, and not just individuals — government agencies, emergency services, businesses — and all they got for hours was a couple of lines that said, ‘Sorry our service is out, we’re working on it’,” committee chair Sarah Hanson-Young said.
“That just is not good enough.
“For a communications company, the communication is pretty lousy both in the time of the crisis and in the aftermath.”
The Greens pushed for and secured the inquiry the day after the outage, and Hanson-Young vowed to examine Optus’ responsibility to look beyond its profits and protect the public.
Triple-0
Bayer Rosmarin revealed 228 calls to triple-0 failed to go through during the outage.
“We absolutely believe the triple-0 system should have worked and it’s critical for all Australians that the system can be relied upon,” she said.
“(But) we don’t manage the triple-0 system, it’s a very complex system that involves all the carriers, it involves the device manufacturers.
“It’s too early to tell where the issue actually occurred.
“The triple-0 system is supposed to be able to pick up the traffic when we have an outage like this.”
Hanson Young accused Optus of trying to “share the blame” when it should take responsibility, apologise and accept a penalty.
“It’s not anybody else’s fault Optus customers couldn’t call triple-zero, surely it’s Optus’s fault,” she said.
Investigations to follow
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has also begun its investigation of Optus’ compliance with the rules on emergency calls.
Bayer Rosmarin has said Optus will cooperate with reviews launched by the government and the Senate.
The company initially blamed the outage on a routine software upgrade, but its updated submission to the inquiry reveals it was the result of its routers’ default settings.
The Cisco routers had automatically self-isolated to protect themselves from an unexpected overload of IP routing information after a software upgrade.
“Although the software upgrade resulted in the change in routing information, it was not the cause of the incident,” the submission states.
It took longer than expected to restore the system because some of the routers needed to be physically rebooted in a “brute force resuscitation of the network” which required Optus staff to be deployed to a number of sites across the country.
‘Strange coincidences’
The outage began at 4.05am on November 8 and was addressed in a crisis meeting at 7.45am, after which Bayer Rosmarin directly contacted Communications Minister Michelle Rowland.
Throughout this period, Optus’s 24-hour staff were attempting to amend the issue as the board worried over whether it was caused by a cyberattack.
“There were some strange coincidences that made us quite worried about that,” Bayer Rosmarin said.
When Optus was last targeted by a cyberattack, representatives from the telco’s parent company Singtel were in town. They also happened to be in Australia when this outage event occurred.
But by 10.20am, Bayer Rosmarin was made aware it was not caused by a cyberattack.
The outage came just over a year after Optus fell victim to a data breach that compromised the information of millions of Australians.