The CEO of Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has been under sustained pressure since Wednesday, when the telecommunications provider’s network experienced a nationwide outage.
The federal government has announced a review into the outage, which affected 10 million Optus customers, leaving individuals and around 400,000 businesses without phone or internet access. The outage began at 4am AEDT and lasted until around 6pm on Wednesday night.
During the outage, the operator of Melbourne’s rail network was forced to shut down its system, while thousands of businesses across the country could not use their payment systems.
Bayer Rosmarin has apologised for the outage, and acknowledged the impact it has had on millions of Australians. She confirmed Optus would provide customers with 200GB of extra data as a form of compensation – there has been no promise of financial compensation for the outage.
“We know that there is nothing we can do to make up for yesterday and what customers want most is for our network to work all the time – which is our number one priority – but we also want to acknowledge their patience and loyalty by giving them additional data to help during the holidays, when so many people consume more data with friends and family,” Bayer Rosmarin said in a statement.
However, in an interview with Nine, Bayer Rosmarin appeared to not understand the impact the outage had on many small businesses after a Sydney barber said he had lost a day’s work.
“I’m disappointed that a barber couldn’t do haircuts today,” Ms Bayer Rosmarin said in an interview with 9 News on Wednesday.
“That seems like one of the few things you can do without connectivity.”
The barber, Jake Azar, told Nine: “It’s a bit much for her to throw me under the bus when she can’t even do her job. If she does her job, I can do my job.”
The Optus outage comes just over a year after a significant data breach that resulted in the compromise of many Optus customers’ personal information. Information such as name, date of birth, email addresses, driver’s licences, Medicare card and passport numbers were potentially exposed in the breach.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry CEO Andrew McKellar was critical of Optus’ communications during and since the outage.
“Clearly this is a major issue that Optus has to respond appropriately to, particularly for those smaller customers,” McKellar told ABC TV. “Honestly it’s been a clown show from Optus in terms of their communications.”
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young will chair the Senate inquiry into the outage. In a statement, she said Optus needed to provide answers to Australians affected by the outage.
“Optus failed Australia on November 8 but instead of fronting up, they tried to phone it in,” Hanson-Young said.
“This Inquiry will be vested with the powers of the Senate to compel Optus bosses to appear publicly and provide the answers and the solutions that Australians deserve. The lives and livelihoods of millions were acutely disrupted on November 8: phones were dead, the internet down, banking broken, childcare centres closed, schools impacted. The public deserves better.
“We want those affected to be fairly compensated and to work so this doesn’t happen again. The inquiry will look at what responsibility Optus has to protect the public, not just their profits.”