Telco CEO Quits After Admitting She Needs Rivals' Sims
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The CEO of Australian telco Optus, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, has resigned after deciding it was in the best interests of her former employer.
Bayer Rosmarin's resignation follows a November 8 outage that saw around ten million Australians unable to connect to any Optus services for fourteen hours.
Optus hid its explanation of the outage in an FAQ at the bottom of this page, where the incident is described as follows:
At around 4.05am Wednesday morning, the Optus network received changes to routing information from an international peering network following a software upgrade. These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers. This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves.
It was later revealed that the source of the routing information was Singtel, the Singapore-based telco that owns Optus. The Optus network connects to Singtel internet exchanges in North America and Asia.
Optus later blamed the incident on default settings in its Cisco routers, which couldn't cope with the volume of changes sent by Singtel as they exceeded safety limits. Optus's submission explaining the outage is, however, silent on or why its network accepted such changes without testing their impact on its kit - a common and sensible approach to operating mission-critical infrastructure.
[...] The danger Optus's outage posed, and the mass inconvenience, earned Bayer Rosmarin an appearance before a parliamentary committee.
[...] Yet Bayer Rosmarin did not do well in her appearance regarding the outage, revealing that the nation's second-largest telco's disaster recovery regime did not envisage a total network outage. Another admission was that the former CEO's personal DR strategy had evolved to see her carry SIM cards for Australia's two rival mobile networks.
[...] Left unanswered is how Singtel poisoned the network in the first place, amid an undercurrent of concern that a foreign carrier - even one from a friend like Singapore - had deep enough access to an Australian network to bring it down.
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