The embattled chief executive of Optus will appear in person before a Senate inquiry next week, as it investigates Wednesday’s outage that left millions of its customers without internet or mobile phone coverage for up to 14 hours.
Optus has confirmed that Kelly Bayer Rosmarin will appear before the inquiry – which was brought on by the Greens and the Coalition in the Senate on Thursday – in the coming days.
The company has faced fierce criticism of its handling of the outage and the time it took to make public statements. The company’s offer of free data as compensation has been branded as inadequate and a “hollow gesture”.
The inquiry, which Nine newspapers reported would start with its first public hearing on Friday and has a wide-ranging remit, was due deliver a report by 9 December.
The Senate voted that the Environment and Communications References Committee should examine how Optus communicated with its customers, what steps it was taking to avoid a repeat of the outage and the compensation it was offering customers.
In amendments moved by the Coalition that were not supported by the government, the inquiry would also look at the government’s role in helping customers get fair compensation and ensuring essential services could still be accessed during outages.
On Wednesday millions of people were left having to search for alternative mobile and internet connections for up to 14 hours after the Optus network crashed.
Hospitals, schools, financial institutions and government departments were unable to make or receive calls for at least nine hours.
An company spokesperson said on Saturday: “We can confirm Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin will appear at the Senate inquiry next week. Arrangements have been made for the hearing to be held next week and Optus representatives, including our CEO, will attend in person.
“Optus is committed to being a customer champion and our objective is to have a network that’s up 100 per cent of the time, and we’re keen for any learnings and eager to assist to ensure this rare occurrence doesn’t happen again.
“Optus sincerely apologises for the inconvenience caused by the outage.”
Alongside the Senate inquiry, the Optus outage has prompted two other investigations, of which the company has said it will cooperate with fully.
The government is developing terms of reference for a “post-incident review” of the outage.
The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, said that process would “identify lessons to be learned” and hoped the review would support all major telecommunications providers to “improve post-outage processes”.
The communications regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, was also checking that Optus complied with rules that emergency calls can always be made.
The chair of the Senate committee running the inquiry, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, had called on the Optus boss to “front up in person” and to “answer questions on behalf of the Australian public”.
She said: “We need to know what has gone wrong at Optus and what they are doing to fix it and deliver this essential service to their customers and the public.”
The inquiry would also look at “regulatory reform” in what she said was a “very concentrated market where it appears profits have come before the public.”
Experts have suggested the outage was due to a misconfiguration of the company’s network.
The company has only said that a “network event” had “triggered a cascading failure which resulted in the shutdown of services to our customers”.
