Optus customers were left furious following Wednesday’s outage, which was not only an inconvenience but cost businesses thousands of dollars and put lives at risk.
More than 10 million customers were affected across the country when one of Australia’s largest telecommunication providers crashed, leaving people without phone service or access to the internet for at least nine hours.
Businesses were one of the hardest hit, with many who rely on eftpos machines unable to serve customers and some forced to shut up shop as a result.
One hospitality business in New South Wales said, in a cashless society, it lost about 80 per cent of customers as a result of the outage.
In Melbourne, cafe owner Johnny Sandish said despite the outage, he continued to serve customers, advising them that they could only pay by cash.
“People were eating and some of them went to the bank and never came back,” he said.
“If some are honest, they’ll go to the bank and they’ll get the money but if not, we have to deal with the losses.
“[It’s] very bad, very frustrating, we’re losing a lot of money.”
Mr Sandish said Optus should foot the bill for the losses of small businesses, and he’s not the only one that thinks so.
“They should give us the money back that we are losing,” Mr Sandish said.
Theo Roussos knows the challenges of running a hospitality business on an ordinary day, but Wednesday was far from that.
“Our music is gone, our phones are gone, anything that’s on the Optus network, it’s completely wiped us out,” he said.
His cafe in Melbourne’s CBD had just introduced a system where customers can order and pay online at their tables, which wasn’t possible yesterday.
The morning rush didn’t come when expected and Mr Roussos estimated losses in the thousands.
“The funny thing is I just changed from Telstra, went to Optus thinking that this wouldn’t go down because Telstra was having problems and now we’ve got the same thing again.”
When asked what Optus should do he said it needed to “please explain or please compensate”.
More than just an inconvenience
It was an inconvenience for Optus customer Leyton Clifford, who said he felt lost without his phone.
“My generation, we love our phones so we didn’t really know what to do,” he said.
“[I’m] a little bit disappointed, you pay all this money to be on a plan and you can’t use it.”
Demand for Uber surged across Melbourne as train services ground to a halt.
Consumers reported trip prices surging more than double the usual fares during the peak commute and some simply couldn’t order an Uber or find another means of transport without phone service.
One commuter told the ABC the outage left people stranded.
“They don’t even have buses yet so no one knows what they’re doing,” she said.
Sangita Lamichhane said, like many others, she couldn’t get to work on time.
“I have to get to work at 7am but it’s already 6:30, and taking an Uber, I won’t get there on time,” she said.
“It’s too frustrating.”
A gym in Canberra had to scramble to put together impromptu classes and turned away a handful of clients after all of their systems went down.
UBX Belconnen manager Christopher Murphy said it had been “panic stations” for staff throughout the day as the gym relied on a constant feed of circuit-style workouts fed through WIFI-connected TVs for its operations.
He said the event had put a lot of strain and extra staff had to be called in to try and manage the disruption by making up workouts and resorting to whiteboards with instructions.
“Our operations were messed around … it does put a sour taste in people’s mouths because this is their stress relief,” Mr Murphy said.
“Internet service is a needed service — we just want reliability.”
Lives at risk during the outage
Some mobile phones weren’t able to get through to triple-0 and hospitals were impacted across the country, including virtual emergency departments in rural and remote areas.
Ramsey Health Care, a private provider that services 73 hospitals across the country, said it experienced widespread disruptions to regional hospitals and health clinics.
The Victorian Ambulance Union said the outage stopped emergency services from calling back patients.
In Tamworth, New South Wales, Danielle Hopewood had to access shopping centre Wi-Fi to get critical updates about her father’s health.
“I’m waiting for phone calls from John Hunter Hospital Cancer Unit,” she said.
A Mildura snake catcher said the outage left people in life-threatening situations after he missed 15 important call-outs and was put two hours behind schedule.
“Two hours can put a lot of people’s lives in danger,” he said.
Meanwhile, residents in the remote WA community of Pummu were completely off the grid, serviced solely by Optus.
Punmu chief executive Edith Costello said it caused some distress among community members.
“It’s the community members’ only form of communication to keep in touch with family,” she said.
“It may seem a minor thing but when it’s 43 degrees and you know you’ve got family on the road, if they don’t turn up or you don’t know when they’ve left, it can cause some problems.”
Victoria’s Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes said it was a concerning situation.
“This is more than just an inconvenience. This has the potential of putting lives at risk,” she said.
Outages of this magnitude ‘rare’
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin said the cause was a “technical network issue” and a “thorough, root-cause analysis” would be conducted by the company before more information could be provided.
She apologised to customers, saying the company’s services have been restored.
Andrew Williams, Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) CEO, said outages of this magnitude are rare but they have occurred in the past.
“This kind of outage really highlights the essentiality of communications. We pretty much live our lives on our phones and we need that connectivity,” he said.
“It’s a bit like electricity and water, you only realise how significant it is when you don’t have access to it.”
Mr said customers should keep a record of losses incurred as a result of the outage in case of compensation.
“After the lessons have been learnt and all of it’s been rectified, then conversations with Optus about how to recompense their customers for any loss involved,” he said.
“So keep a record and make sure it’s quantifiable.”
Telecommunications expert professor Mark Gregory said the Optus national outage was “unacceptable”.
“In 2023, the idea that we could have a national outage in one of our major telcos is quite unthinkable,” he said.
Last year, a cyber hack exposed the data of millions of Optus customers with a class action against the company winding through the courts.
“For Optus, this latest national outage is really the nail in the coffin for their reputation,” Mr Gregory said.
“Telecommunications is part of our daily life and Optus doesn’t seem to get that.”
He wants the government to force telcos to have back-up systems to stop this happening again.
“I believe that it’s time for the government to take stronger action to overcome these problems,” he said.
The Consumer Action Law Centre said it’s monitoring the situation to ensure Optus has provided appropriate protections to the Australian community, and is complying with its regulatory obligations.
It’s calling for Australia’s telecommunications sector to be more tightly regulated.
