The head of Australian operator Optus has resigned following a major outage earlier this month that left more than 10 million people without mobile telecoms and internet, parent company Singtel announced on Monday.
Chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was replaced three days after he was questioned by the Australian Senate over a technical glitch that disrupted Optus’ mobile and internet communications for almost 12 hours in the early hours of November 8.
“Now that I have had time to reflect, I have decided that my resignation is in the best interests of Optus,” he said in a statement released by Singtel.
Singtel chief executive Yuen Kuan Moon said the Optus boss had led the company through a “challenging period” while managing to improve the company’s financial performance, including during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We understand his decision and wish him the best in his future endeavours,” said Mr. Yuvan said.
Optus has appointed chief financial officer Michael Venter as interim chief executive in addition to his current role pending the succession of Ms Bayer Rosmarin.
According to Optus, the massive nationwide outage was caused by its overloaded routers automatically disconnecting during a scheduled software update.
Unable to identify the exact cause of the outage after six hours, Optus had to perform a hard reset of its settings.
Ms Bayer Rosemary declared during a hearing before the Senate on Friday that the Optus network should have been able to overcome the damage, “but, this time, it failed”.
Published at 11:10 am on November 20, AFP
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