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Just days after she was grilled in a Senate estimates hearing for a slew of incidents affecting Optus, chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has announced her resignation.
The now-former Optus chief attended the Senate hearing on Friday (17 November) to answer questions regarding the telco’s 14-hour service outage earlier in the month.
In the aftermath of this, Bayer Rosmarin said she would be leaving her position as CEO of Optus.
“On Friday, I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate to expand on the cause of the network outage and how Optus recovered and responded,” she announced.
“I was also able to communicate Optus’ commitment to restore trust and continue to serve customers.
“Having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward.
“It’s been an honour and privilege to lead the team at Optus and to serve our customers.
“I am proud of the team’s many achievements and grateful for the support of the Optus team, Moon, and the group. I wish everyone and the company every success in the future.”
Filling the gap left by Bayer Rosmarin will be Optus chief financial officer Michael Venter until a new CEO can be appointed.
The Optus outage that occurred earlier this month affected customers nationwide, with both the telco and its parent company, Singtel, denying blame. The former pointed the finger at the latter, saying the outage came as a result of bad route data supplied by Singtel, during a routine software update.
“These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these,” said Optus.
“This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.”
However, Singtel defended itself, saying that Optus had advance notice of the upgrade and that it was not the cause of the outage.
“The STiX upgrade was completed within 20 minutes, and all its customers’ routers that were connected to it, including Optus’s, were up and running,” said Singtel.
“We are aware that Optus experienced a network outage after the upgrade when a significant increase in addresses being propagated through their network triggered preset failsafes.
“However, the upgrade was not the root cause. Singtel will support Optus as it learns from what has occurred and continues to improve.”
The outage was the second major incident Optus has suffered in just over a year, having suffered from one of the largest cyber attacks Australia has ever seen late last year.
About 9.7 million current and former customers were affected, meaning over one in three Australians.
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