July
Why business is left helpless when big tech stuffs up
Experts say there is little most organisations can do to avoid future calamities like the CrowdStrike outage, but Australia’s emergency responses are improving.
- Paul Smith
CrowdStrike failure raises billion-dollar compensation question
Insurers could bear the brunt of costly fallout from the global IT outage on Friday, as techies at companies worked over the weekend to get services back up and running.
- Paul Smith and Ronald Mizen
What is CrowdStrike? The IT giant behind the global meltdown
Flights were cancelled, broadcasters went off air, trains didn’t run and medical procedures were delayed around the world.
- Kate Conger and Claire Moses
December 2023
Ex-chief Kelly Bayer Rosmarin severs final ties with Optus
The former chief executive stayed for the transition to acting chief executive of Michael Venter, who is also the company’s chief financial officer.
- Jenny Wiggins
November 2023
‘We didn’t have a plan’: Optus admits it was caught out
In a make-or-break appearance for Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, senators failed to land a knockout blow, but gleaned some damaging admissions.
- Updated
- Paul Smith
Optus says payouts for mass outage would set a precedent
Optus has laid out its defences to criticism of its network outage, as CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin considers her future.
- Paul Smith
ASIC warns of ‘alarming’ holes in business’ cyber defences
ASIC is alarmed at corporate Australia’s lack of preparedness for digital threats, while experts say it will be costly for telcos to comply with new cyber laws.
- Paul Smith
Optus faces review, compensation claims amid earnings slide
CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin and her executive team have been blasted for leaving politicians to do the company’s crisis communications after Wednesday’s national outage.
- Paul Smith and Jenny Wiggins
- Opinion
- Cyber warfare
The Optus outage wasn’t a hack. Here’s why we’re screwed if it had been
Optus’ chaotic outage wasn’t cyber warfare, and that’s lucky. We saw that we can’t function if one part of our digital lives falls over.
- Paul Smith
‘Cash only’ and old-fashioned IOUs: how businesses dealt without Optus
Thousands of companies and enterprises were disrupted by the outage that left millions of Australians without phone or internet services for close to nine hours.
- Tess Bennett
- Updated
- Telecommunications
Optus CEO says ‘no soundbite’ to explain phone outage chaos
Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said the cause of a national outage of phone and internet services was too ‘technical’ to explain.
- Updated
- Jenny Wiggins and Paul Smith
September 2023
Square payment outage raises red flags at the Reserve Bank
Block-owned Square does not report data on reliability and outages to the RBA. That might change after its payments system went down on Friday.
- James Eyers
May 2023
Telstra mobile phone users suffer 11-hour outage
Mobile phone users in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide began having difficulties at 10pm on Monday. The problem wasn’t fixed until 9am on Tuesday.
- Updated
- Tess Bennett
October 2022
ASX still working on automation for outages
The market operator says it will deliver another consultation paper exploring ways to automate services during outages.
- Ayesha de Kretser
RBA restores payment system after major outage
A failure after a software update involving its virtual servers had frozen money transfers worth almost a billion dollars at big banks across the country.
- Updated
- James Eyers and Ayesha de Kretser
August 2022
- Exclusive
- Aviation
The tech problem that caused Qantas flight chaos
Qantas passengers were stranded on tarmac around the country on Sunday night, being told only that it was a “computer issue,” the real problem has now been revealed.
- Tess Bennett
June 2022
ASX pledges to do better on outages, ASIC wants trading alternatives
ASX issued a paper on equity market outages, while ASIC said all market participants should allow new orders to trade on an alternative market by mid-2023.
- James Eyers
February 2022
ANZ records the longest time for payment outages
Banks have published data on major payment systems going down. ANZ online banking was out for 17 hours in the December quarter.
- Updated
- James Eyers
December 2021
![Jason Yetton: “I would think it [wealth platforms] is a pretty attractive, high-growth market for people to be interested in.”](https://static.ffx.io/images/$zoom_2.0648%2C$multiply_1%2C$ratio_1.777778%2C$width_1059%2C$x_237%2C$y_22/t_crop_custom/c_scale%2Cw_140%2Cq_88%2Cf_auto/8518a08c290f41dcb66dad4bbf78ec215116695f)
Westpac ready to kick off Panorama sale
Jason Yetton, who is running Westpac’s asset sales, says several parties are keen on BT Super and the sale of the Panorama platform will begin in late February.
- James Eyers
October 2021
Facebook accused of cashing in on small business ads despite outage
Facebook’s outage last week caused thousands of dollars in marketing spend to either evaporate or redirect into less efficient audiences.
- Jessica Sier
