Dr Peter Stone has resigned from the Bureau of Meteorology and will leave the agency on June 30, closing a long tenure that ended under the shadow of a website overhaul that drew heavy criticism from users, ministers and state leaders alike.
Stone, the bureau’s chief customer officer and a former acting chief executive, joined the agency in July 2017 and took extended leave at the end of June. A bureau spokesperson said he had made the decision to retire. The resignation was reported on May 19, 2026.
The departure matters because Stone became one of the faces of the bureau’s troubled digital rebuild after the launch of a new website almost seven months before his resignation. The redesign landed during savage storms across Australia’s south-east, when people were trying to get fast, reliable weather information, and instead many regular users struggled to navigate the site. Farmers and fishermen were among those affected.
Stone gave a mea culpa one week after the new site went live, saying it would “take time for some to adjust” to the changes. The explanation did little to ease the anger. Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt said the website had not met users’ expectations, while the Queensland premier blamed the “flawed” redesign for failing to help Brisbane residents prepare for approaching storms.
Watt later called for the bureau’s top brass to front state ministers and explain how they would deal with the public fallout. Soon after the update, Dr Stuart Minchin took over as head of the agency, and the bureau swiftly reverted the BOM radar to the old version after the backlash. The sequence left a clear message: the problem was not just cosmetic, but operational, at the exact moment people wanted the system to work most.
The website upgrade was one piece of the bureau’s broader Robust security and technology overhaul, a project described as nearly decade-long and aimed at improving forecasting and security after a serious cybersecurity breach in 2015. But the spending figures have remained a source of friction. The bureau initially said the redesign cost $4.1 million, yet that figure did not include a $78 million website design contract for Accenture Australia or extra security upgrades. The disclosed costs of the website work were closer to $100 million, while the wider overhaul totalled $866 million.
That history has kept Stone under scrutiny beyond the website. In a 2024 court case, Judge Doug Humphreys said he was “an unsatisfactory witness” and found that he acknowledged part of his first affidavit was untrue. Humphreys also said Stone admitted there was “no decision to be made about recruiting or not recruiting” after being pressed in oral evidence.
His resignation does not end the questions around the bureau’s spending, its handling of the redesign or the judgment used to push it through. What it does mark is the departure of one of the agency’s senior figures at a moment when confidence in the bureau’s digital front door has still not been fully rebuilt.
