What CIOs Can Learn From The Massive Optus Outage
CIO, Thursday, November 23,2023
The Australian telco's outage, which has already led to a leadership shakeup, offers IT leaders important lessons in resiliency and disaster recovery, as well as a prompt to reassess plans, spark conversations, and make investments to mitigate risks and avoid fallout.
The week's high-profile resignation of Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin in the wake of the Australian telco's massive outage that left 10 million Australians and 400,000 businesses without phone or internet for up to 12 hours earlier this month underscores the stakes involved when it comes to setting an IT strategy for business resilience.
At a Australian Senate inquiry last week, Lambo Kanagaratnam, the telco's managing director of networks, told lawmakers that Optus 'didn't have a plan in place for that specific scale of outage.' Rosmarin herself admitted that prior to the outage she carried a spare SIM card from competitor Vodafone - and that since the outage she now carries a second spare SIM from rival Telstra.