The Squiz

After a bruising day of criticism and scrutiny, Optus announced its make-good offer after its national network outage on Wednesday that left 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses up the creek without a phone or Wi-Fi connection for 14 hours. Consumer and small business customers will get 200 gigabytes of bonus data, while prepaid customers will get unlimited data on weekends until the end of the year. Off the table – monetary compensation. CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin also explained what was behind the outage. She said that “a network event” caused by a faulty router update triggered “a cascading failure” across the telco’s “multiple layers of fall back and redundancy” [insert shrugging lady emoji…]. 

Will that fix things? 

Unlikely… Communications Minister Michelle Rowland announced a review into what caused the Optus blackout and how a repeat could be avoided. She also confirmed the communications regulator will investigate emergency triple-zero calls going down on Optus landlines, saying it’s “critical that industry and governments take stock following large-scale outages”. Adding to that, a Greens-led Senate Inquiry has been launched – it wants boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin to front up and explain the company’s handling of the saga. And as businesses report that the outage cost them a pretty penny, Chamber of Commerce boss Andrew McKellar called the company’s response on the day and afterwards a “clown show” and reckons monetary compensation would be fair. Reports say the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman could direct Optus to pay up to $100,000 in compensation to business customers and $1,500 to individuals. 

So there’s a bit going on…

Yep, and that’s not all… Reports say fed-up Optus customers – many of whom also went through the company’s data breach saga last year – are taking their business to rival telcos. In a quirk of timing, parent company Singtel released the telco’s annual results yesterday featuring revenue and customer growth despite last year’s hack, but this week’s drama has seen questions about Bayer Rosmarin’s future at the helm resurface. Another big criticism is that the company’s response to the outage was slow and inadequate, with Bayer Rosmarin and her team accused of not learning enough from last year’s hack. With the Senate Committee’s remit to speak to the main players and its report deadline of 9 December, we’ll hear more about these issues soon…