Good afternoon Sizzlers! Just another reminder that this is the penultimate edition for the year. I’m thinking about breaking with format tomorrow and picking a few Sizzle winners and losers of 2025. If you have anyone you want to nominate, send me a message or drop in the Slack or forum - CW

Also don’t forget to check out the Sizzler last minute Christmas gift guide!

The News

Optus had widespread fuckups that led to their big triple-zero outage, review finds

Heads will roll and changes will be made to Optus’ call centres and network operations over the 18 September triple-zerooutage, after the company’s board responded to a review of what went wrong (news dot com dot au). The Optus board received the report earlier this week which slapped the telco for “gaps in process, accountability, and escalation and information protocols”. The report blames a communication breakdown with Nokia for causing the outage initially but, crucially, for ignoring “early alerts” and treating complaints as if it were a problem on the customer’s end. Optus’ board says it has accepted all 21 recommendations, with the chair John Arthur promising “financial penalties through to termination in appropriate cases.” (Sorry I can’t seem to find a copy of the actual review, I’ll update the web version if I do).

The Sizzle: Suggestions like having stricter rules around network upgrades and improving the ability to escalate issues seems like a no brainer. The decision to move call centre operations back on shore seems kind of like a second order issue — the problem isn’t that call centres are elsewhere, per se, but that clearly their staff are disconnected from the rest of the company — but if it helps, I can’t see a good reason why not to pursue it. Vague promises to improve culture and avoid siloing are nice but, let’s be real, every organisation has that. The real problem is it’s fundamentally impossible to test this because the stressor for these systems is the things that you don’t expect. Let’s hope this isn’t just box ticking operation for a board and company under pressure.

Also how’s this for timing: some Optus customers this morning were suffering an outage.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

GitHub is doing an excellent job of pissing off its user base right now

GitHub has successfully pissed off a lot of people for no reason by proposing and then walking back an idea to charge people to use runners that they host themselves (IT Brief). For those not familiar, a runner is a bit of software that co-ordinates running (get it?) certain software tasks. At the moment, you can get GitHub to use its cloud computing to run the tasks for a fee or you can use your own computers, just using GitHub to essentially be like the traffic controller for various tasks. Yesterday, GitHub said it would cut the cost of the runners it hosts, while beginning to charge for people who self-host — a first. This pissed off a lot of people who’d built their various workflows around this service. Then, today, GitHub backflipped on the self-hosting runner fee for the time being, but noted that “we have real costs in running the Actions control plane.” (GitHub).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

2025 was a pretty good year for Australian games

Our good friends at the Australian independent gaming outlet SIFTER have published “The definitive list of Australian made video games” made this year. Of course, you’ll have heard of the smash success Hollow Knight: Silksong, but there are some other hidden gems in there like Tavern Keeper, Lushfoil Photograph Sim and The Drifter. Worth a geez through the list to see if there are any that take your fancy — and it’s great to see someone chronicling a part of culture that doesn’t get much shine in the mainstream media.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Contrary to popular belief, the Pluribus smart fridge didn’t send Carol mad

There was a viral Reddit post a few weeks back that claimed that an advertisement for the new hit Apple TV show Pluribus on a smart fridge had sent a woman to a psychiatric hospital. The ad, the post claimed, had convinced a woman that she was suffering delusions because it had included her name which she chalked up to a sign of her deteriorating mental health.

This grimly comic post was shared widely as one of the pitfalls of shoving ads onto every screen in our lives. Alas, it seems, it was too good (or too bad, I guess) to be true. Someone actually looked into it and realised that someone had joked about this exact scenario in Reddit a few weeks earlier, and there’s no proof that the original poster was telling the truth (Apple Insider). So, for now, we’re marking this as “bullshit” — but it is tempting to say it feels true.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.