The woeful response of the Optus upper management to the catastrophe suggests heads must surely roll,but the broader issue of the national outage juxtaposes the benefits of connectivity and the wonderful things it offers to the economy and society with the downside that when things go wrong,they have the potential to go horribly wrong.
Millions of Optus customers were affected by an hours-long outage on Wednesday.Chris Hopkins
And things certainly by an apparent technical breakdown that consigned the cashless society to oblivion for at least nine hours,crippled business,hit payment and banking systems,curtailed healthcare payments,disrupted hospitals and sent transport networks into chaos. Calls to the triple zero emergency line could not be made on Optus landline services. More than 10 million customers were left without a phone service or access to the internet.
Unbelievably,the company appeared frozen,with chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin and her senior management team saying next to nothing for hours,leaving the nation and the federal government to guess what had gone wrong. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was forced to go live on television to fill in the gaps left by Optus’ silence and urge the company to communicate better. The company’s management turned a technical problem into a massive business and public relations disaster that alienated their most precious commodity,the customer.
Bayer Rosmarin seemed to have learnt little from Optus’ previous travails.
In September 2022,almost 10 million Australians had personal information and other highly sensitive data stolen by cybercriminals who discovered easy access through an unsecured bit of software. That time too,Bayer Rosmarin was nowhere to be seen initially,only to break cover to declare erroneously that the data breach was the result of a high-tech hack. She later changed her mind,saying no data had been stolen because everything was encrypted. A class action against Optus over the hack is still winding through the courts.
Optus is certainly facing another inundation of compensation claims from consumers and businesses,but it has proven it cannot be trusted when disaster strikes. Given Rosmarin’s history of poor responses,the federal government and the Australian Communications and Media Authority are to be congratulated for the alacrity with which they launched investigations into the Optus outages. ACMA’s review is focused on Optus’ failure to keep providing access to triple zero,which could amount to a breach of its obligations.
Optus said it would co-operate with both investigations. It can hardly do otherwise. But doubts remain about just how much the company is prepared to reveal. Bayer Rosmarin brought in consultants Deloitte to investigate the 2022 hack,but their report has not been made public even though it was completed months ago. Laws surrounding disclosure for a publicly listed company – that any information that may affect the share price must be made public – no longer apply here because after Optus was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange,major shareholder Singtel opted to take it private.
For its part,Singtel has remained shtum,but the reputational damage done to its Australian business from Wednesday’s mass outage is undeniable. The investigations come as Optus on Thursday announced a 14 per cent slide in earnings before interest and taxation in the six months to September to $141 million.
The Optus crash was Australia’s largest mobile communications network failure. It is unlikely to be the last. And with our increasing dependence on connectivity,it is vital that the investigations under way focus on helping to reduce the impact of future outages.
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