A review will be launched into the Optus outage that affected millions of Australians, as the telco ombudsman urges those impacted to raise compensation with the provider.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said connectivity was “absolutely essential” for consumers and businesses, while announcing the federal government’s investigation.
“While we welcome that Optus services were restored over the course of the day, it is critical the government conducts a process to identify lessons to be learned from yesterday’s outage,” she said.
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The minister said she would task her department with developing the terms of reference for a post-incident review.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has independently commenced an assessment to investigate Optus’ compliance with the rules on emergency calls.
The telecommunications watchdog is urging small businesses to get in contact with Optus to discuss options for compensation.
“What we would encourage you to do is contact Optus and … help them understand what the impact was on them and their earnings,” Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said.
“That’s the sort of thing that we think you need to tell Optus so they get a sense of what sort of compensation might be the right thing to do for your circumstances.”
Ms Gebert said the scale of the outage was unacceptable as it impacted emergency services and hospitals in addition to small businesses and transport services.
Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones slammed Optus’ response as “absolutely subpar”.
“You’d have thought coming off the back of the previous data breach where they were facing similar calls from customers to explain exactly what was going on, this simply wasn’t good enough,” he told ABC’s RN.
“My colleague Michelle Rowland was out there trying to fill the gaps.
“It’s not her job as the minister to explain what’s going on inside of a company.”
Businesses are counting the costs after the nationwide outage ground trading to a halt.
More than 10 million customers and businesses were thrown into disarray from about 4am, with customers prevented from connecting to the internet or making or receiving calls.
It took more than 12 hours to restore services.
There are calls for the company to explain why the nation’s second-most popular telecommunications network went down.
The Greens are pushing for an inquiry in the Senate.
Businesses had been dealt multiple blows, a day after the Reserve Bank increased interest rates, National Retail Association director Rob Godwin said.
“This is costing businesses thousands of dollars in sales that they are now in dire need of given yesterday’s rate hike,” he said.
Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said she understood how much people relied on the connectivity and indicated the company would consider how to compensate them.
‘We’re now starting to think about ways in which we can thank our customers for their patience as we work through the outage today and reward them for their loyalty to Optus,” she told ABC News on Wednesday.
“We will definitely consider every avenue as we turn our attention, now that services are restored, to how we work with our customers.”
Almost 10 million Optus customers had their personal information stolen during a massive data breach last year.
The telco believes a network fault was behind Wednesday’s outage.
People weren’t able to call triple zero on landline devices, although it was still possible to do so on a mobile phone.