On the HN thread of the day that this happened I had a comment downvoted for suggesting the fault originated with Singtel (my fault for not expanding - it was in response to a rhetorical question that had 'Australia' as the 'obvious answer').

Regardless of the fault origins, this is a justified resignation.

Optus (buck stops with CEO) totally and utterly borked the PR handling of this from the get go.

They had multiple oportunities to get out in front, to shape the story, to make a statement. to answer a few obvious questions, etc.

I've rarely seen a large company like this just ditch the playbook for handling PR in the face of a screwup and sit things out for hours with no comment.

Was it eight hours before any kind of official response of substance?

WTF was going on internally and where the hell was the PR dept.

It did seem strange that any response took such a long time, and even after that amount of time the response was effectively a shrug emoji. I mean, yes, it's lying, but standard playbook is to say something along the lines of "we've identified the cause and the resolution is proving trickier than initially estimated, but we're expecting full network service back up within X"

I have to assume the CEO knew this was a final straw after the 2022 data breach, and this shit-show PR was essentially a free-kick since the writing was already on the wall.

Was probably also told: you know you're fired, but not until you've fronted the senate committee, we're not going to subject our new CEO to that as their first order of business.

Related: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-20/kelly-bayer-rosmarin-...