Kelly Bayer Rosmarin: Embattled Optus CEO carries rivals’ sims card to protect her from outages

Embattled Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin carries a spare Telstra and Vodafone SIM card to keep connected in case of an outage like the one that struck up to 10 million of her own customers. Ms Bayer Rosmarin made the concession during a tense Senate inquiry on Friday, during which she also revealed that 228 calls to triple 0 were unable to go through during the November 8 outage — and she doesn’t know why. The embattled CEO was grilled for two hours on the outage that affected millions of Australians, brought trains to a halt in Melbourne and left small business owners unable to complete EFTPOS transactions. Ms Bayer refused to be drawn on speculation she was considering resigning in the aftermath of the 12-hour blackout. “My focus is on the team, the customers, and the community. My focus is not on myself,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said. During aggressive questioning on Friday, Ms Bayer Rosmarin was asked to explain why Optus failed to communicate to the public and its customers, how 200GB of free data could constitute fair compensation, and how many people could not dial triple-0 on their landlines for most of the day. “We absolutely believe that the triple-0 system should have worked, and it’s critical for all Australians that the system can be relied upon,” she said. “(But) we don’t manage the triple-0 system — it’s a very complex system that involves all the carriers, it involves the device manufacturers.” Under questioning from Greens senator, and inquiry chair Sarah Hanson-Young, Ms Bayer Rosmarin revealed she carried Telstra and Vodafone sim cards as backups in case the Optus network went down. “I now have all three. I used to have Vodafone, but I have Telstra now, too,” she said. An irritated senator Hanson-Young shot back, “It would be good if the public could just easily swap, wouldn’t it?” Earlier this week, Optus, the country’s second-biggest telecommunications company, revealed an upgrade by its parent company — Singtel — sparked the outage, which cut off services to up to 10 million Australians and 400,000 businesses. In a submission to the inquiry, Optus confirmed what Singtel said on Thursday night that the issue was, in fact, the result of its Cisco routers’ default settings. It disrupted emergency services, hospitals, transport systems and businesses nationwide. Ms Bayer Rosmarin said the telco should have coped with the change to its network and apologised to its customers. “We didn’t have a plan in place for that specific scale of outage,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said. “It was unexpected — we have high levels of redundancy, and it’s not something that we expect to happen. “While I believe wholeheartedly that we did everything we could to provide timely, accurate and credible information (but) I acknowledge that there is always more we could have done. “Beyond restoring our network, our focus now is restoring trust.” She also told the inquiry that she doesn’t like the term “compensation” when talking about reimbursement for customers but said Optus had already paid out some customers in addition to the free data offered. About 8500 customers and small businesses have asked for compensation, totalling around $430,000. Of this amount, $36,400 has already been paid out. Ms Bayer Rosmarin said she was unsure if it was cash payouts or free services. Last week, the former Commonwealth Bank executive general manager said Optus would not refund its customers for the outage. Still, the telco later revealed it would offer free data as a “thank you for your patience”. Optus first issued a two-sentence statement, and then seven hours after the service meltdown, Ms Bayer Rosmarin fronted the media. Instead of holding a press conference to explain what happened, she contacted individual radio stations and journalists. She also denied claims of poor communication at the time. “Some have criticised me for not appearing publicly sooner. The key reason for this was two-fold,” she told the inquiry on Friday. “Firstly, I prioritised the team’s actual crisis response, which included not only a clear focus on the immediate recovery of the network but also decisions around how to handle our call centre being down, whether to open our stores and add security and support for our frontline. “Most importantly, we needed to identify if the outage resulted from a malicious or ongoing attack. This was critical to ensure we could re-establish the network safely. “Secondly, I wanted to ensure that before I spoke, and given how little information we had about the cause and potential restoration time, we could at least rule out the possibility of malicious activity to reassure our customers and the nation.” Greens communications spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young, who chairs the committee, lashed the boss of the Singaporean-owned telco giant for failing to engage with its customers during the service failure. “You provide a service to over 10 million people and not just individuals — government agencies, emergency services, businesses — and all they got for hours, was a couple of lines that said, ‘sorry our services out we’re working on it’,” Senator Hanson-Young said. “For a communications company, the communication is pretty lousy.” The inquiry will also investigate how the Commonwealth can step in during large-scale blackouts, with a final report due by December 9. The Federal Government and the Australian Media and Communications Authority have also launched two separate investigations on the Optus outage.