Optus has revealed customers will be entitled to extra data as compensation following a nationwide outage of its network.
Millions of people were impacted when the network went down for several hours on Wednesday, as the telco giant scrambled to resolve the issue.
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin on Thursday confirmed eligible postpaid customers will be able to access 200GB of extra data after the bungle, and have until the end of the year to activate.
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Eligible prepaid customers will also be able to access unlimited data on weekends until the end of the year.
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin again apologised for the outage, admitting the service knows it let its customers down.
“We truly appreciate our customers’ patience and understanding as we worked to restore our operations yesterday,” she said.
“We know that there is nothing we can do to make up for yesterday and what customers want most is for our network to work all the time — which is our number one priority — but we also want to acknowledge their patience and loyalty by giving them additional data to help during the holidays, when so many people consume more data with friends and family.”
Further details will be available on how to add the offer to their plans from Monday.
Optus has blamed the nationwide shutdown on a “network event” that triggered a “cascading failure”, which left millions without phone or internet access.
The telco said engineers were continuing to investigate the shutdown.
A senior Optus technician told 7NEWS the company’s push for market share was outpacing its capabilities.
The insider says dated hardware had been repurposed for 5G, including amplifiers to get the signal out, and some compliance plates were dated “2012”.
While it works, the high level of streaming and smartphone usage means there are eight times the number of devices now using the network at peak than a decade ago.
Senior Optus staff are believed to be examining a recent 5G software upgrade intended to improve error rates and coverage.
Impacted customers reported issues when attempting to call triple-0 throughout the day, meanwhile Melbourne’s train network was also shut down for several hours due to safety issues as train drivers were unable to communicate.
Multiple hospitals, healthcare services and banks were also caught up in the outage.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has started an independent assessment to investigate Optus’ compliance with the rules on emergency calls following the complaints.
The telecommunications watchdog is urging small businesses to get in contact with Optus to discuss options for compensation.
