Operations Is Where The Money Is

Things to note

Australian telco Optus fell over hard this week with its network completely down for all customers for 7-12 hours or so. It’s hard to fathom how such a massive failure of a core, business-critical system could run for that long, and Optus aren’t saying anything much about the cause. The Australian government is going to insist Optus explains it, with several inquiries kicked off. Lots of government departments and critical services like hospitals are/were Optus customers. My money is on BGP, a footgun, and Optus ‘accidentally’ creating a single point of success. Corporate intentionality, you’re hearing it more and more.

Optus will need to be compelled to do a proper post-incident review, because it’s still trying to keep the Deloitte report it commissioned to review last year’s massive data breach a secret. A year later and we still don’t have a public, independent explanation of just how Optus put an insecure API endpoint onto the Internet. I’m sure the OAIC is busily plodding its way towards some sort of report. If we’re lucky, it might get published by 2028.

I was at KubeCon this week, courtesy of the Linux Foundation. There was a lot of nonsense about AI, but the customers I spoke to weren’t really that interested in it. They were busy with other, less hype-filled concerns.