The end of Kelly Bayer Rosmarin’s tenure as chief executive at Australia’s second-largest telecommunications company can be essentially traced back to one word. Routine.
At 4.17pm on Monday, November 13, nearly a week after the mass network outage that crippled rail networks, hospital communications and business nationally, an email landed in journalists’ inboxes.
Former Optus CEO Kelly Bayer RosmarinCredit: AFR
Titled ‘Media Alert: Update on Optus outage’ and drafted by Bayer Rosmarin herself, the update was an attempt to shed light on the technical details of the outage after days of virtual silence from both Optus and its parent company, Singtel, as to what had really happened.
“We have been working to understand what caused the outage on Wednesday, and we now know what the cause was and have taken steps to ensure it will not happen again. We apologise sincerely for letting our customers down and the inconvenience it caused,” the email read.
“At around 4.05am Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changes to routing information from an international peering network following a routine software upgrade.”
There was one problem.
Bayer Rosmarin had not used the word “routine”. In fact, Optus’ statement on its own website at the time of publication omits the word “routine”, with the rest of the wording virtually identical.
Executives at Singtel had inserted the word before the statement was sent to journalists.
It may seem innocuous, but Singtel’s intervention goes to the heart of the blame game that unfolded between Optus and its Singaporean parent, and eventually led Bayer Rosmarin, facing an untenable situation on multiple fronts, to fall on her sword.
Less than ‘match fit’ Optus pays a heavy price for failure
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24.11.2023
The end of Kelly Bayer Rosmarin’s tenure as chief executive at Australia’s second-largest telecommunications company can be essentially traced back to one word. Routine.
At 4.17pm on Monday, November 13, nearly a week after the mass network outage that crippled rail networks, hospital communications and business nationally, an email landed in journalists’ inboxes.
Former Optus CEO Kelly Bayer RosmarinCredit:........
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