Optus said it didn't have the 'soundbite' to explain the crisis. We should expect better

Asked on Wednesday to explain why Optus broadband and mobile services had been simultaneously knocked out for five hours, its chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin blamed a “technical network fault”, and then added:

There is no soundbite that is going to do it justice, so we want to really bottom-out the root cause, and when we have that very clear and in a digestible form, we will be forthcoming.

There are a couple of ways to interpret this statement. Either she didn’t want to indicate what her engineers really thought had happened, or she believed Optus users wouldn’t be able to understand the truth.

Or she might not have been thinking about Optus users.

Her reference to a “soundbite” seems to suggest Optus regards its key audience as the media rather than its customers.

Optus is baked into too much of what we do

With more than 10 million mobile customers alone, accounting for more than one-third of Australia’s population, the Singapore-owned Optus has become integrated into almost everything Australia does, from the operation of railways to automatic teller machines, to hospitals to emergency services.

Its customers, both corporate and personal, have become increasingly familiar with technical terms and technical explanations.

Those customers not only know more than they did – understanding many of the terms that apply to both software and hardware – but they expect more from technology, knowing that even some of their own jobs can potentially be replaced by artificially intelligent algorithms.

Many of those customers would be not only be asking “how did this happen”, but also “how could this be allowed to happen, given what technology is capable of”.