Optus Outage, OpenAI Upgrades & Data Disasters: IT War Stories

A national telco goes dark, OpenAI drops GPT-4 Turbo, and hard drives start randomly deleting terabytes of data – this high-energy Mixed Byte episode of SEEK Bytes is a chaos tour through the realities of modern IT. Will, Seamus and Elliott Millar break down what happened, why it matters, and what every technologist should be thinking about next. In this episode, we explore: • Inside the Optus mega-outage – 10+ million customers offline, rail networks and even hospitals impacted, a federal investigation launched, and what it teaches us about incident management, DR and working on systems that underpin critical infrastructure. • What OpenAI’s Dev Day really means for IT – custom GPTs trained on your proprietary code and docs, models that can infer how microservices connect, help you find system owners and surface inefficiencies, plus GPT-4 Turbo’s huge 128K context window and lower pricing. • Backup horror stories & the true cost of losing data – from LAN-party hard drives literally burning out and wiping 10–15 years of music and photos, to external drives dying mid-copy and eye-watering $1,000+ data-recovery quotes that only enterprises (or lawyers) can justify. • Cloud vs physical storage for modern IT teams – why many of us now trust autosynced cloud photo libraries and object storage, when spinning disks and tape still make sense, and how data scale (from personal files to petabytes of 8K video) completely changes your backup strategy. If you work in software, cloud, data, networking, ops or security, this episode is packed with “that could be us” moments – plus practical takeaways for resilience, AI adoption and not losing the only copy of your life’s work. 🔔 Follow the SEEK Bytes podcast so you never miss a new episode