Optus is picking up the shattered remains of customers’ confidence as it faces the fall out from its second major crisis in 18 months.
The telecommunications giant suffered a 12-hour outage on Wednesday that prevented 10 million customers and businesses making and receiving calls, or connecting to the internet.
Customers, politicians and business figures have unleashed a storm of criticism on the telco, with the Greens securing a Senate inquiry into the disaster and the federal government launching a review.
The outage occurred as the company was starting to recover from a data breach in September 2022 that affected millions of customers and led to the theft of 10,000 passport, driver licence and Medicare numbers, which were leaked online.
Optus director Matt Williams says the company knows its customers could turn to other phone service providers.
“We really value, very highly, the relationships we have with our customers, the loyalty they have to us, their ongoing choice of us,” he told AAP.
“We provide unique and amazing value, as well as features and experiences that our customers can’t get anywhere else.
“So we’ll continue to provide all those things (and) work very hard to make sure that we rebuild those experiences with our customers and that relationship.”
Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles said the telco needed to be upfront about what caused Wednesday’s outage.
“Optus really needs to make clear to its customers exactly what happened here,” he told Nine’s Today program on Friday.
“It’s obviously why we’ve undertaken a review so that we can learn the lessons of this, not just for Optus, but in fact for all telecommunications.”
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said a review would be cold comfort for businesses affected by the outage.
“The level on which we rely now on interconnected society, on these services being up to scratch is phenomenal, and the government needs to work harder,” he said.
“(Customers) have a reliability question in their minds now about the service being provided by Optus, and I think they’ve got a lot of repair work to do.”
Optus has offered extra data packages to its customers, with postpaid users eligible for 200GB of extra data and prepaid users able to access free unlimited data on weekends until the end of the year.
Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin says the offer is a way to thank customers for their patience and loyalty.
“We know that there’s nothing we can do to change what happened,” she said.
“We really appreciate the patience and understanding that our customers have shown.”
But with businesses losing thousands of dollars in sales during the outage, it remains to be seen whether extra data will be enough to satisfy them.
After the 2022 data breach, Optus funded a credit monitoring service for impacted customers and covered the costs of licence number changes.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth encouraged businesses who suffered financial losses from the outage to contact the teclo directly.
“I would certainly encourage anyone that has had financial losses to approach Optus, and if they get no joy, go to the telecommunications ombudsman,” she told Seven’s Sunrise program.
Ms Rosmarin has faced increased scrutiny over her choices as CEO, but Mr Williams says critics should focus on Optus as a whole.
Optus says the outage was caused by a “network event” that triggered a cascading failure. Its engineers are investigating the issue.
The company says it will welcome and cooperate with government investigations.
