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The man who was in charge of the Optus network during last year's mass outage has quit exactly four months after the incident that left 10 million Australians without any phone service.
The telco announced today that managing director of networks Lambo Kanagaratnam is leaving the company after about nine years.
Optus did not link his departure to the November outage.
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"After nearly nine years of service, Lambo Kanagaratnam has made the decision that the time is right for him to leave Optus," interim CEO and CFO Michael Venter said in a statement.
"Lambo joined Optus in 2015 after an international career bringing a wealth of experience from working internationally in a number of countries around the world."
According to the Optus website, Kanagaratnam was "responsible for the technology strategy, design, build and operations" of the telco's network across the country.
He appeared alongside then-CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin in a Senate hearing in the aftermath of the November outage, when he admitted Optus was not prepared for such a large outage.
"We didn't have a plan in place for that specific scale of outage," he said at the time.
"It was unexpected. We have high levels of redundancy and it's not something that we expect to happen.
"It's certainly something that we commit to learning from."
The outage was a public relations disaster for Optus, coming little more than a year after its highly publicised data breach.
The two incidents severely damaged the telco's standing, with pollster Roy Morgan saying yesterday it remains the most distrusted brand in Australia.
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Venter said Kanagaratnam had his "highest regard" and wished him well.
"Lambo has helped our teams navigate through some uniquely challenging major natural disasters ranging from cyclones, floods and fires as well as responding to the complexities that COVID and the recent outage presented for our customers and network teams," he said.
"He cares deeply about our customers and his team.
"Under his leadership, our networks teams have materially improved our customers' overall network experience and have also become more customer-centric in the way we measure network experience."
Optus' chief technology officer Jorge Fernandes will fill Kanagaratnam's position on an interim basis until a full-time replacement is found.
