Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has stepped down from his position less than a fortnight after the Australian telecoms giant struggled with a severe nationwide outage, Bloomberg reported.
The 12-hour-long telecom outage on November 8 resulted in widespread disconnection for millions of Optus mobile and internet users across Australia.
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In addition, critical sections of the country’s public transport system were rendered inoperable. The outage also caused the failure of hundreds of emergency calls intended for police, ambulances, and firefighters.
Mounting Pressure
After her appearance last week in a parliamentary inquiry investigating the outage, Bayer Rosmarin faced increasing pressure to leave her position.
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The investigation highlighted that Optus, a subsidiary of Singapore Telecommunications, lacked a specific contingency plan to deal with a large-scale network breach. In addition, Bayer Rosmarin avoided questions about her future during the investigation.
Her departure marks a significant development following the recent network failure, underscoring the growing challenges the telecommunications giant faces in managing and preparing for such crises.
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Risk of Cyber Attack
In particular, this time outage is not the first mistake under the leadership of Bayer Rosmarin. Earlier in September, Optus suffered a cyberattack that may have exposed customers’ personal, identifiable information, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The company then said it had stopped the attack and was working with authorities to investigate the matter.
“While not everyone may be affected and our investigation is not yet complete, we want all of our customers to be aware of what happened as soon as possible so that they can increase their vigilance. We are very sorry and understand that customers will be concerned, Bayer Rosmarin said in a statement.
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Optus said information including customers’ names, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses may have been exposed, but that payment details and account passwords were not compromised. A subset of customer addresses and ID document numbers may also have been exposed, it said in a release.
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Updated: 20 Nov 2023, 07:29 IST