Optus Senate inquiry as it happened: Kelly Bayer Rosmarin admits telco’s performance during outage was ‘not acceptable’

This concludes our coverage. You can read a full wrap of today’s Senate inquiry in our story here.

Here’s what we learnt today:

• Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said Optus’ performance “was not acceptable” and the company has “taken immediate and ongoing steps to rectify any shortcomings”.
• More than 200 triple zero emergency calls were unable to go through on the day of the outage.
• Bayer Rosmarin woke up to her phone not working on the day of the outage and rushed to the company’s network operations centre, arriving at the company’s Sydney headquarters about 7.30am, as previously reported by this masthead, and held a crisis meeting between 7.45am until 8.30am at its network operations centre. She said she did not know some customers could not dial triple zero at the time she spoke to Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, which was at 8.32am, about 4½ hours after the outage began about 4.05am.
• Optus is looking at whether it has outsourced too many components of its network infrastructure to third-party companies.
• The telco initially feared the outage may have been the result of a cyberattack, as it was a “very strange coincidence” that the board of its parent company Singtel were in Australia during the network meltdown, just as they were a year ago when Optus suffered a major cyberattack.
• Bayer Rosmarin defended her decision to not hold a press conference on the day of the outage, saying it would have been unusual for a chief executive and that the public’s expectation would have been for her to focus her attention on fixing the problem.
• The CEO said parent company Singtel approved the telecommunication giant’s initial statement that an upgrade at a then-unnamed “international peering network”, later revealed by this masthead to be run by Singtel, contributed to the outage. “The statement that they put out [this week] is not a contradiction, but rather a clarification … They were trying to clarify the way that the statement was being interpreted,” Bayer Rosmarin said.
• Optus did not have a plan for a full outage of the telecommunications network. “We didn’t have a plan in place for that specific scale of outage,” Optus managing director of networks Lambo Kanagaratnam told the Senate inquiry. “It was unexpected.”
• Bayer Rosmarin dodged questions about whether she intended to resign from her role, following a report in the Australian Financial Review on Friday that she may step down as soon as next week. “Senator, I’m sure you can appreciate that my entire focus has been on restoring the outage issue... It has not been a time to be thinking about myself,” Bayer Rosmarin said.
• Optus has paid out $36,000 in compensation for the outage.

• The telco said in its submission to the Senate that while it didn’t wish to detract from the impact of last week’s outage, disruptions were an “inherent risk” and fact of life for telecommunications networks, with a variety of causes to blame, including physical damage, human error, routing errors, software and hardware failures and natural disasters.

Both Optus chief executive officer Kelly Bayer Rosmarin and the managing director of the company’s networks division, Lambo Kanagaratnam, fronted a Senate inquiry into the telco’s outage last week.

You can watch a replay of it below:

As the hearing draws to a close, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young says she is “flabbergasted” that Optus hadn’t considered letting its customers roam onto the Telstra or TPG networks during the national outage.

“Is it because you don’t want your customers being able to roam on a competitor’s network? Is this about protecting your own profits ahead of the interests of the customer?” she asks. “I don’t understand why this wouldn’t already be on your list of things to investigate.”

Responds Optus chief Kelly Bayer Rosmarin: “Firstly, we don’t see profits and customers as opposed in any way. We only make a profit if we have happy customers, and more customers choose us and more customers choose to stay with us. So for us to be profitable, we want to do the right thing for customers.

“And secondly … given that Optus has ... about 30 per cent market share, let’s say hypothetically that there was a fault on Telstra network, where they have 50 per cent market share, and suddenly all of those subscribers were to be on our network. We would have to have already invested in the capacity to be able to cater for that many customers simultaneously.

“So there are a lot of considerations if we go down this path about investment capacity, and how that all works to make sure that you don’t inadvertently, if one goes down, bring down another network.”

Hanson-Young suggests Bayer Rosmarin “get on with talking to your competitors and making sure the Australian people are actually looked after and can access a service that is essential.”

Nationals Senator Ross Caddell said he had received several emails from Optus staff about poor staff engagement surveys, and then asked Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin whether it was time for new leadership.

“Thank you, senator, I will take that on board,” Bayer Rosmarin responded.

Earlier, the chief executive and managing director Lambo Kanagaratnam told senators there was strong feedback from staff on engagement surveys.

Caddell read one of the emails he said he had received from Optus staff: “I just note that engagement surveys we did [over the] last couple of years had nothing about attitude or outsourcing and keeping intellectual property in house. They [the surveys] are pretty much about Optus values. There’s some things about staff development, nothing about workload, how skilled the people are.”

The Nationals senator told the telco chief executive: “Given you haven’t responded to the customers well, given you haven’t reflected your staff’s attitude, isn’t it time for new leadership at Optus?”

As mentioned earlier, there was a pause (about 3 seconds) when Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was asked several times to respond to a report in The Australian Financial Review that she was considering resigning as the chief executive of Optus following the outage and last year’s cybersecurity breach.

You can replay that tense moment here: