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Optus CEO Quits After Crippling Nationwide Phone Outage

2023-11-20 08:15
Optus Chief Executive Officer Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned less than two weeks after the Australian telecommunications company suffered
Optus CEO Quits After Crippling Nationwide Phone Outage

Optus Chief Executive Officer Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned less than two weeks after the Australian telecommunications company suffered a crippling nationwide outage.

The Nov. 8 crash disconnected millions of Optus mobile and internet customers, and disabled parts of Australia’s public-transport network. Hundreds of emergency calls for police, ambulances or firefighters failed to connect.

Bayer Rosmarin was under mounting pressure after appearing last week at a parliamentary inquiry into the outage. The probe revealed that Optus, which is owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., had no specific contingency plan for a comprehensive network failure, and Bayer Rosmarin sidestepped questions about her future.

Read More: Optus Boss Dodges Questions Over Job After Australia-Wide Outage

In a statement Monday, Bayer Rosmarin said she’d had time for “some personal reflection” following her testimony to the inquiry. “My resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward,” she said.

The crash struck Optus little more than a year after it was hit by a major cyberattack that exposed the personal information of almost 10 million former and current customers. Singapore Telecommunications had stuck by the Optus boss following the hack, but the recent outage led to a stock selloff in Singapore and made Bayer Rosmarin’s position less tenable.

Announcing the departure, the Singapore company said she had led Optus though a “challenging period.”

“We view the events in recent weeks very seriously,” Singapore Telecommunications CEO Yuen Kuan Moon said in the statement. “Optus is an integral part of our group’s business.”

(Updates throughout, adds comment from Singtel CEO in final paragraph.)