The failure of the Optus mobile, broadband and fixed line network for several hours on Wednesday morning is a reminder of three important lessons about the Australian economy and the way we do business here.As such, many of our sectors are dominated by a small number of players who need massive scale to survive.
Yes, outages happen. Telstra has had them in the past, and probably will again. But each such episode serves as a reminder that key national infrastructure is in the hands of a very small group of very large players.Which brings us to our second lesson: a digitised world can also be a vulnerable one. We learnt this through the, but they did not hamstring the functioning of the economy like Wednesday’s failure has done.
Telecommunications Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert went on Melbourne’s 3AW radio station and admitted that she had only been informed of the outage by the media; she too urged Optus to give customers more information than the limited social media posts it has provided, which essentially say “we’re working on it, sorry about all this”.searing public and political firestorm last year when it was hacked.
You’d think that it would be well versed in crisis management. You’d think there’d be a list of people that someone inside Optus would call in case of emergency, with the communications minister and the ombudsman near the top. You’d think spokespeople would be bombarding the media with messages of reassurance.
For the second time in 12 months, we can expect that Bayer Rosmarin will be in full public apology mode in the coming days. But Optus may find that contrition isn’t enough this time around. The company’s initial response to this outage would suggest the communications lessons from last year’s hack have not been learnt.