Australia’s second-largest telco, Optus, had no crisis plan when a network-wide outage left nearly half the country without phone or Internet connections for 12 hours, an executive told Parliament on Friday, acknowledging the company’s defences had failed. Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin agreed with Singtel that the software upgrade itself was not the “root cause” of the outage.
The Singtel-owned company had recently war-gamed scenarios in which the routers that direct voice and Internet data failed in entire states, but it never expected a nationwide shutdown because it had alternate connections built into its network. “We didn’t have a plan in place for that specific scale of outage,” Optus managing director of networks Lambo Kanagaratnam told a Senate hearing on the Nov 8 failure that left much of the country unable to make payments, receive healthcare or contact emergency services for most of a day