Flying Blind No More: Critical Thinking Lessons from Qantas’s Call-Center Breach

How questioning vendor assumptions, stress-testing incident scenarios, and countering cognitive biases can safeguard customer trust in an outsourced world.

Abstract
On July 9, 2025, Qantas Airways confirmed a data breach affecting 5.7 million customer records, originating in a third-party call-center platform (Chalmers, 2025; Jones, 2025). Although financial credentials and travel documents remained secure, 1.7 million records included sensitive data—birthdates, addresses, and phone numbers—heightening iden…