The fallout from the Optus outage has worsened for the telco giant’s chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin after cutting comments she made about a barber affected by the blackout badly backfired.
More than 400,000 businesses were impacted for up to 12 hours by Wednesday’s nationwide service outage, which cut off internet and phone services for customers of the country’s second largest telco.
North Sydney Barbers manager Jake Azar was forced to turn away customers and close his business by lunchtime, a decision that cost him hundreds of dollars.
To make matters worse, cunning customers took advantage of the EFTPOS blackout by saying they were going to ATM to get cash to pay – but never returned.
During a media appearance, Ms Bayer Rosmarin was baffled to learn that the mass outage impacted on a barbershop’s ability to do haircuts.
The manager of North Sydney Barbers (pictured left) has hit back at comments made about his business by Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin
‘I’m disappointed that a barber couldn’t do haircuts today,’ she told Nine News on Wednesday.
‘That seems like one of the few things you can do without connectivity.’
The comments about his business sparked anger from Mr Azar, who felt like he was thrown under the bus by the Optus boss.
He has since issued a scathing response.
‘If she does her job, I can do my job. But I can’t do my job if she’s incapable of doing her job,’ Mr Azar told news com.au.
‘I had a bit of a laugh about what she said, but she needs to take more responsibility.
‘If I do a bad haircut, I have to own that and fix it. If I can do that, she can do that on her end instead of bagging customers.’
Mr Azar now plans to switch phone providers and sign up with Telstra in the wake of the latest debacle, just a year after Optus customers were impacted by the data leak scandal.
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was astonished to learn that a barber couldn’t do haircuts on Wednesday
North Sydney Barbers (pictured) was forced to turn away customers and close by lunchtime on Wednesday
Small Business Association of Australia chief executive Anne Nalder blasted Ms Bayer Rosmarin’s comments as out of touch.
‘How can you say that’s all you’ll get if you’ve lost staff wages, there’s no productivity going on? Goes to show you how out of touch she is with the real world. Any CEO saying that should be sacked,’ she said.
Other Aussies weighed into the furore after watching the Nine News interview.
‘How was the barber supposed to get paid for providing those haircuts with the network down?’ one viewer commented.
Another added: ‘She’s humiliating the barber? He can do job without connectivity? So she’s suggesting he doesn’t get paid? Thought we were going cashless?.’
A third wrote: ‘How did she get into the role with a blasé attitude like this?’
One business owner fumed: ‘Is that a f***** joke? Did she just laugh at robbing a small business owner of trying to survive and probably feed his family. This is getting beyond a joke. It’s gone way past firing her, she borderline needs to be locked up.’
It comes as Optus announced it won’t provide financial compensation to customers. They will instead receive 200 gigabytes of extra data, which can only be used on weekends and must be activated by the end of the year.
‘The bottom line is, we wish we could have done something different today and we know there is nothing we can do to make up for it,’ Ms Bayer Rosmarin said.
‘So we hope our customers appreciate that we really tried to do something valuable for them.’
The cause of the outage was a technical fault.
The fallout from the mass outage continues from Optus 48 hours later
Around 400,000 businesses were impacted by the Optus outage, including this coffee shop in Adelaide which could only do cash transactions
