Last Friday’s Senate hearing had all the signs of a final act for Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, who quit three days later after facing an unprecedented level of pressure, including a two-hour sustained grilling from senators across the political spectrum.

Rumours were flying in the days leading up to the hearing that Bayer Rosmarin was already considering stepping down, after first presiding over one of Australia’s most severe data breaches, and then one of the country’s worst ever telecommunications outages. All of it within the space of a year or so.

Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin during a Senate hearing at Parliament House in Canberra on Friday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Those rumours of her exit materialised on Monday morning and Bayer Rosmarin’s departure has sparked speculation whether the executive was effectively pushed out by the board of Optus’ parent company Singtel, or if she chose to leave the business.

The financial toll had already begun racking up for Optus parent company Singtel, with rivals Telstra and TPG each reporting early signs of customers jumping ship. That’s before the inevitable hefty compensation bill it will be forced to pay to business customers, and any potential consumer class action lawsuits still to come.

Bayer Rosmarin may have also succumbed to the mounting pressure, which only intensified after the senate hearing, and decided to pick up a far less stressful job.

She told this masthead on her first day as Optus CEO, on April 1, 2020, that she was no stranger to a crisis, having served in an executive capacity at CBA during the global financial crisis, and at a technology start-up during the dot-com bust of the early 2000s.

Lines outside an Optus store on the day of the outage earlier this month.Credit: Chris Hopkins

“My life lessons have made me very well-prepared to take the helm at this time of a global pandemic, and I’m going to be leveraging all that experience,” she said.

With Bayer Rosmarin’s CEO tenure at Optus now coming to a premature end, attention will turn to succession. So, who’s in line to pick up the top job at Australia’s second-largest telco?