01 · Optus
Sixty percent of a national network
NOC shift lead for ~40 engineers. Full service restored in 40 minutes.
40 minNational restore
How I ran it
The sequence on the night.
- 01
Take the chair. Incident controller, then duty manager — about forty engineers on the floor.
- 02
One bridge. Technical teams, managers and vendors in the same room, not three parallel calls.
- 03
Restore first. Impact, next action, and when the next update lands — a sentence executives can take upstairs.
- 04
Clock: full service in forty minutes on a major that took out ~60% of the national network.
- 05
Write it down. The next shift gets the timeline, not a war story.
At Optus I was the shift lead in a true 24x7 command centre: incident controller, then duty manager, directing a rotating team of about forty engineers. The job is simple to describe and hard to do. You are the central authority while the network is failing, vendors are on the bridge, and management wants a sentence they can take upstairs.
On one major I coordinated recovery of an incident that took out roughly 60% of the national network. Technical teams, managers and vendors on the same bridge. Full service restored in forty minutes under operational pressure — not a war-room story for later, a clock that was running in public.
The same seat covered the events that do not fit a runbook: back-to-back high-severity bridges lasting more than fourteen hours, iPhone launches, Christmas traffic. Senior executives noticed the ones that held. I was promoted from incident commander to NOC shift lead inside two years.
That is the standard I still work to. Command the room. Restore the service. Then write down what actually happened so the next shift is smarter than this one.