Optus says it will “fully co-operate” with both reviews.
“As a critical infrastructure provider, we understand how important it is to ensure continuity of service and any lessons learnt are likely to be helpful for both Optus and others in our industry,” the telco’s vice president of regulatory and public affairs Andrew Sheridan said.
Lines outside an Optus store in Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall on Wednesday.Credit: Chris Hopkins
“We value our customers’ loyalty, and are looking at ways to say ‘thank you’.
“Optus once again apologises to our customers and others that were impacted by the outage.”
Speaking on Nine’s Today program, Rowland said the government would aim to complete the review into Optus’ outage as soon as possible.
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“We’ll be aiming to [complete the review] most expeditiously because we understand that consumers and businesses are exactly as you say, are very frustrated and will want some answers,” Rowland said.
“I think the terms of reference here also need to apply across the industry because we need to take those lessons for the other carriers and service providers as well.”
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said there was a need to understand how Australia’s second-largest telecommunications service let this failure happen.
“This is not a small matter and the parliament will have to look at what Optus can and should be doing, what they knew, how this failure happened and there needs to be … consequences for this type of outage,” she said.
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“It is not good enough for this big company, Optus, to simply phone it in through a radio interview this morning, rather than fronting the customers, talking to the press and telling Australians what’s going on.”
It comes as Optus’ parent company Singtel is set to deliver its financial results for the first half of 2024 on Thursday.
Singtel’s executive board has been visiting Australia this week, and the company’s shares fell by nearly 5 per cent on the Singapore Exchange on Wednesday.
“Obviously I’ve kept them fully updated and they’ve been extremely supportive,” Bayer Rosmarin told this masthead on Wednesday of the Singtel board. “They’re experienced in running telcos all around the world. They understand the realities of dealing with critical infrastructure, and we’ve had nothing but support.”
Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert said affected Optus customers have already contacted the watchdog.
“I think there’s just an erosion of trust that’s been going on [with Optus],” she said on ABC radio on Thursday.
“But we are anticipating that people will initially contact Optus to try and get it resolved and then keep coming to us over the coming days and weeks if they haven’t been able to get it resolved directly with Optus,” she said.
The ombudsman said updates to customers would have been helpful, and pointed to how electricity companies managed outages.
“They give you an update and a sense of how long you need to be able to manage without access to an essential service. Ideally, we’d like to see things like that being brought into the telco industry so that you [get updates] either through media or through web apps,” Gebert said.
She said many complaints went to the ombudsman because people didn’t have access to information.
“If you can give them information, you actually prevent complaints, and you build that trust and confidence that you care enough to resolve their issues,” she said.
In terms of compensation to customers, Gerbert said there were a variety of outcomes that Optus could think about.
“I do think for some people – particularly small businesses with loss of trade – compensation is something that would be the fair and reasonable outcome.”