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Just over a year ago telco giant Optus was engulfed by a massive data breach.
Ten million Australians were sideswiped by the hack, and its bitter reverberations continue to rumble on.
As Optus tries to recover from that standing eight-count, today the telco was smashed right back on the ropes, suffering what one tech expert described as "without question the biggest telco outage we have ever seen".
READ MORE: Services restored for some Optus customers, CEO says 'no line of sight' to cause of network crash
What that devastating statement looks like is millions of people and scores of businesses and crucial infrastructure across Australia left without mobile or internet, and Optus landlines not being able to call Triple Zero in life and death emergencies.
When Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin called into ABC radio this morning to elucidate matters, she could offer little insight over what had happened, and was even forced to use WhatsApp to make the call because her own network was flatlining and dead.
Bayer Rosmarin, the 45-year-old chief executive, said it is "highly unlikely" the fault was the result of a hack, and framed the meltdown as a "very, very rare occurrence".
Eight hours after the fault was first reported, Bayer Rosmarin had no estimation for when the problem might be fixed.
The fault hit around 4am, and by midday the company's engineers still hadn't even diagnosed the problem, according to Optus, let alone come up with a solution. Finally, at 12.15pm, Bayer Rosmarin said there was a "path to restoring our network".
Businesses have been unable to make calls or take payments for goods and services, hospitals across the country have been impacted, and Melbourne's entire metropolitan train network was temporarily ground to a halt due to the outage.
Some people reported they could not make bank transfers because verification text messages which usually authorise the transactions couldn't be sent or received.
After last year's September data breach, more than 100,000 aggrieved current and former Optus customers launched a class action lawsuit against the telco.
"This is potentially the most serious privacy breach in Australian history, both in terms of the number of affected people and the nature of the information disclosed," Slater and Gordon senior associate Ben Zocco said.
The cyberattack had exposed the personal details of millions of Australians, including birth dates, addresses, passport and driver's licence numbers.
Those details will have been bundled up and sold on the dark web.
READ MORE: Can you get compensation for the massive Optus outage?
At the time, Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil claimed the breach had been the result of a "basic" effort by cyber criminals, an assertion that will come under scrutiny during looming court action, unless Optus chooses to settle.
The question over just how strong Optus' security protocols actually were remains.
"Responsibility for the security breach rests with Optus," O'Neil said in parliament in the aftermath of the attack, "and I want to note that the breach is of a nature that we should not expect to see in a large telecommunications provider in this country."
In the wake of the breach, the Optus brand took a hammering.
A flow of headlines about how the company used, held and failed to protect data dominated the news cycle for weeks.
The telco became a lightning rod for anger and resentment from distraught customers, worried about what would happen to their details on the dark web, and when those chickens might come home to roost.
As a result, Optus suffered a $1.2 billion blow to its brand image, according to Brand Finance, which reports on the ups and downs of Australia's most well-known companies.
The telco also plunged 27 spots in the report's brand strength index, slipping from 14th to a lowly 41st in 2022.
How Optus handled the breach infuriated many, from customers to politicians.
As anger brewed, the telco commissioned Deloitte to investigate the breach, with the consulting firm given a brief to find out and document how it happened.
But despite initially saying it would make that report public, the company later backtracked and decided it would be kept secret.
READ MORE: All the services impacted by mass Optus network outage
Security analysts and the public will never get to read the report, which may have clarified whether a skilled operator orchestrated the breach or if Optus had been guilty of a schoolboy-type error, which has been reported by the Australian Financial Review.
Bayer Rosmarin has outright rejected any suggestion that a hacker slipped in through a window that was carelessly left wide open by someone in the company.
"The cyberattack was not a casual crime of opportunity," Bayer Rosmarin said at a business summit earlier this year," The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
She described the person as a "skilled criminal" who had had knowledge of Optus' systems and "cycled through many tens of thousands of internet protocol addresses in an attempt to evade our automated cyber monitoring."
An anonymous figure asked Optus to pay a $1 million ransom in cryptocurrency, a bounty that was never paid, according to Bayer Rosmarin.
Speaking to media this morning, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland had stern instructions for Bayer Rosmarin and other top execs, such as former New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, at Optus HQ.
"It is vital for Optus to be transparent and timely in the updates it is giving to customers about the nature of the fault, its impacts, and its possible rectification," Rowland said.
She said it appeared the problem was a "fault deep in the core network".
Optus is continuing to investigate.
