- Insiders are tipping that Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin will be forced to resign or be sacked with questions now being raised about her “fluff” image with Labor Senator Karen Grogan slamming her comments, at a Senate inquiry into the collapse of the Optus network earlier today.
Bayer Rosmarin and Optus managing director Lambo Kanagaratnam are being grilled at the Senate inquiry about last week’s Optus outage that saw 10 million Australians affected.
Rosmarin initally dodged questions about whether she intends to resign from her role at today’s Senate Inquiry, following recent media reports that she may step down as soon as next week.
“This morning there’s been a media report that you intend to resign as CEO. Is it your intention to resign?” Liberal senator Sarah Henderson asked.
“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.
Rosmarin claims she is not considering resigning from her position at Optus and that her focus remains on the network and its customers.
She claims that she hadn’t seen any reports about her resignation and that “it has not been a time to be thinking about myself”.
When asked a second time, she said: “I thought I answered the question. My focus is on the team, the customers, the community. My focus is not on myself so that report is not correct.”
The question now is whether she will get pushed out by the board who are facing a difficult time ahead with Rosmarin at the helm after two major problems for the network undrr her watch.
Things were so bad on the day of the crash that Optus didn’t even know its customers could not call emergency services via mobiles services during an outage that left 10 million Aussies including business in the lurch and cut off from communication.
Rosmarin has apologised to customers as she was lashed over her “pretty lousy” response to the outage at today’s Senate Inquiry.
The appearance and the collapse of the network last week has angered both current and former Optus management.
The “Optus girls club” as one insider describes it to ChannelNews have spent the last two year building her image while she should have been concentrating on the business they claim.
“Past managing directors including Chris Anderson, Paul O Sullivan or Alan Lew did not have the publicity bent that Rosmarin has sought” claims one senior executive who is upset that her image and lack of performance has bought unstuck a lot of good work done by Optus management in the past.
“I’m finding a lot of what you’re saying very, very fluffy,” Labor Senator Grogan said of the Optus CEO who has been photographed with her dog, supposedly talking to affected consumers in a leather coat after the hack attack last year as part of her image building campaign.
Despite a cast of advisors to prop her up before her Senate appearance Rosmarin struggled to cut down to facts.
“Because we could spend two hours sitting here not actually getting the details that we require.” said Grogan,
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young agrees, remarking “it’s time that someone got the story straight.”
Senator Sarah Henderson asked Bayer Rosmarin whether she was given legal advice to not admit fault or to be careful about what she said in case Optus customers demanded compensation.
“I was given no advice by my legal team to say or not say anything,” she told the inquiry.
“And all the interviews I did, I was not on a script. I am the CEO, I’m accountable. I took that accountability. And I said what I believed was right.”
Optus
Then there was the issue of Singtel’s involvement. The owners of the Optus network, the Singtel board was in town when the hack attack happened and during their latest outage.
It was a “very strange coincidence” that the board of Optus’ parent company Singtel was in Australia during the outage, just as it was a year ago when Optus suffered a major cyber-attack” Rosmarin claimed.
“We did really want to understand if it was malicious or [a] cyber [attack] and the ongoing threat that that could pose, and there were some strange coincidences that made us quite worried about that,” she said.
“For example, when we had the cyber-attack [in late 2022], it was the last time the Singtel board was in town. And they were in town again. So that was a very strange coincidence.
“And so, whilst they’ve ruled out the denial-of-service attack, as one technical type of cyber-attack, there were other vectors of cyber malicious activity and threat intelligence that we were chasing down and it took the team until 10.20 to be able to confirm that. But it was a very serious concern for us in those hours up until 10.20.”
The normally publicity seeking CEO whose Corporate Affairs team are also being called into question for their actions, in building her image instead of concentrating on business issues, some claim in an effort to one upmanship Telstra is now being questions as to why she failed to call a press conference.
She claims that decision to not hold a press conference on the day of the outage, saying it would have been unusual and that the public’s expectation would have been for her to focus her attention on fixing the problem.
Gen who is Kelly Bayer Rosmarin
Claims that she stayed at home to concentrate on a photo shoot at her house have been refuted with Rosmarin telling the inquiry that she immediately headed into the office after she woke up and realised, she could not use her phone.
Apparently, Telstra and Optus executives carry SIMS from rival networks just in case their own network goes down but not Rosmarin.
She told a Senate inquiry she thought it was unusual she could not use either the mobile or internet services because they were run separately, so she realised “it must be a more serious outage.”
“I arrived in the office around 7.30am and I headed straight to the network operations centre where the team told me what was going on,” Bayer Rosmarin said. “I called a crisis and we had a crisis meeting from 7.45am till 8.30 and my immediate next action at 8.40 was to call the minister for communications and share what I knew.”
The chief executive said she told Communications Minister Michelle Rowland everything she knew about the crisis, “and it wasn’t very much because at that point we had no idea what had caused the issue nor restoration time.”
24 hours after the attack ChannelNews sent emails to Optus management questioning the operators of the network and the use of third-party operators linked with parent Company Singtel.
She admitted to the inquiry that Optus is looking at whether it has outsourced too many components of its network infrastructure to third-party companies.
It’s also been revealed it was Cisco routers hitting a failsafe mechanism that triggered the outage.
“I think it’s very important to say that we do outsource a number of components of our network management to global leading companies. And it is something that I do think we should look at, as whether we have the right level of outsourcing and insourcing,” she told the Senate committee.
“And it is something that has been on the minds of the team that we’ve already been thinking about.
“Further, I can tell you that our networks team is highly experienced. There are a number of engineers who’ve been network engineers for many, many years. They’re a very hard-working team. They are absolutely devastated about what happened. And they go above and beyond to try and keep the network operating all the time. So, we do have a lot of experienced people.
“We take our responsibility to keep the network up and running incredibly seriously. It’s in everybody’s interests. Our customers, our own shareholders, the communities, and we do everything we can to avoid a situation like this. And we’re very apologetic that it happened, but I don’t think it should cause people to doubt just how much effort attention resourcing and financial commitment we have to resilience.”
More than 200 triple zero emergency calls were unable to go through on the day of the outage, Optus chief executive Bayer Rosmarin has revealed.
“There were 228 triple-zero calls that were unable to go through, and we have done welfare checks on all of those 228 calls. And thankfully everybody is okay,” the executive said.
Lambo Kanagaratnam the Optus network boss, who has only managed networks in South Africa and Iran, claims that Optus could not recall the last time an extensive review of its network architecture took place.
He told the inquiry that he would need to come back to the inquiry with an answer while Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin put forward that the company also uses third-party services to review its networks.
“We also, from time to time, have third party experts review and help us assess whether our resilience is as strong as it should be and whether the steps we’re taking are adequate,” she said.
Following the crash Optus receivved 8500 consumer and small business complaints, with a compensation bill a tad under half a million dollars.
Rosmarin confirmed the company had paid $36,000 in compensation claims, and that it faces a $430,000 bill so far.
However she was not able to confirm whether compensation had been paid in cash or in services or other benefits.
Asked about expectations on total compensation, she said: “I don’t want to make any commitments on how much we’re going to pay.”
At one stage independent Senator David Pocock asked how many small businesses had been affected, Rosmarin said she had the numbers on her phone. As she took out her phone, senators joked whether her phone was still working.
“I’m confident that it’s working,” Bayer Rosmarin responded.
When a senator joked she was taking too long to pull up the numbers, the chief executive said: “I think that’s just me. We do have the fastest 5G.”
Former NSW PremierGladys Berejiklian, seen second right, is one candidate who is being tipped as being able to take over the top job.
In one final stab Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young claimed that she she was “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.”
Rosmarin responded claiming “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”
She added “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 in a blunt address to Rosmarin said “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.”
More to follow.
