Calls for the Optus CEO to be sacked are clickbait and unnecessary

It’s been three days since we learned about the tragic failure of the Optus Triple Zero network and the four deaths associated with it. Predictably, there are already calls for the CEO Stephen Rue to be sacked or resigned and that’s the most remarkable thing I’ve read in a long time.

Now if Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was reading this she’d be spitting out her morning cup of tea – because I was vocal in my calls for her to resign over the course of a year after the Data Breach in 2022 and Network outage in 2023. But there’s almost nothing that those incidents and this one have in common.

My first calls for Ms Bayer Rosmarin’s resignation came three weeks after the data breach. At that time the then CEO fronted the media two days after the Cyber Incident, but didn’t raise her head again.

Her team – under her leadership, failed to answer simple questions from the media time and time again.

Optus took weeks to directly contact all customers about the Cyber Incident, and – for me the most disgraceful of all, Optus never, ever, contacted directly the 10,200 customers who’s details were published online by the hackers as a threat and proof of their attack.

Bottom line, Optus failed to communicate. They failed to communicate with customers and the media through one (and then another) of the biggest crisis in their history.

Contrast that with the last three days.

It’s as if Optus is doing the opposite.

Stephen Rue addressed the media just over 24 hours after the company learned of the Triple Zero outage. They waited, it seems, until all 600 affected customers had been contacted or attempts had been made to contact them as per the Emergency Calling regulation welfare check requirements.

Contacting people affected was a big part of the reason for the million fine over Triple Zero failures in 2023 – Optus never contacted 360 people who had tried to call Triple Zero and failed.

The daily press conferences might seem a bit much, but for me, having sat through all three of them, it’s been a very transparent process. As an example, on Day 2 I sat down with the following questions ready to go after the CEO had made his statement:

• When did Optus first learn that triple zero services were not working
• Was this during the outage?
• Did Optus think the system update had gone to plan? Only later to find out about this issue?
• When did you first start wellbeing checks
• When did you learn there had been deaths involved in this outage?
• When did you alert the federal regulator or government and who do you alert?

Thing is, he answered each of those questions IN his own statement.

There are always going to be questions, and when things fail you always look to who could have prevented it.

No one ever said Kelly Bayer Rosmarin or any of her own decisions caused the Network outage or Cyber Incident, but her failures in communications and customer care after the fact were damning.

Stephen Rue has been the complete opposite.

Leadership is what gets organisations through the toughest of times, Leadership is what the company needs right now and they appear to have just that.

The transparency of information is a win. The planned appointment of an independent investigation is a win. And small changes like ensuring all customer service calls that elude to an issue with Triple Zero is escalated and not treated like just another calling issue is an indication of how to improve.

Let’s give them time.