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When Optus’s mobile and fixed-line services went dead at about 4am east coast time on Tuesday, no-one who knew anything was talking, for hours.
Into the void stepped Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, who was forced to concede on breakfast radio that hours after critical communications infrastructure had stopped working, disrupting services including railways, shops and hospitals, she hadn’t heard from or been able to get in touch with the head of Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin.
When Bayer Rosmarin finally did speak, six hours after the shutdown began, it was to the ABC via WhatsApp. And she had nothing much to say other than that she recognised “how important connectivity is to all of our customers.”
Today, Alison Stieven-Taylor says Bayer Rosmarin ought to have had a communications plan in place. She ought to have had the importance of one drummed into her a year ago when an Optus data breach exposed the personal details of up to 9.8 million of its present and former customers.
Although we’re still unsure of the cause, all signs seem to point to some kind of issue in the “core network” – or in other words, the systems that allow Optus customers to connect to phone and internet services.
Specifically, our authors suggest the outage was likely a result of a system fault – such as a scheduled outage gone wrong.
It could also be due to a bug in an accounting or user management system, which may have then had a cascading effect.
In any case, Optus will likely want to make amends for the damage caused, and may do so in the form of reduced bills for customers. It ought to act quickly if it wants keep its reputation, especially since the memory of last year’s data breach looms over us still.
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Peter Martin
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