Thanks for reading Need to Know this Friday, November 17. Here today’s biggest developments:

- 8500 small businesses have sought compensation from Optus: Kelly Bayer Rosmarin says she doesn’t like the term “compensation” when talking about redress for customers, but that the telco has already paid out some customers in addition to offering them free data.

- Outage affected 228 triple zero calls: Kelly Bayer Rosmarin says Optus is still unsure about why some 000 calls failed to go through during its outage.

- No disaster plan in place for Optus outage: Optus’ network boss Lambo Kanagaratnam conceded that the telco had never held a crisis planning simulation for an outage of the scale it suffered last week.

- ‘Our networks should have coped’, says Optus CEO: Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin gave her opening statements to a Senate hearing about last week’s network outage with an apology to its customers.

- Sally Cray to take helm as RBA’s first chief communications officer: Malcolm Turnbull’s former principal private secretary, Sally Cray, has been appointed to the newly created position of chief communications officer at the Reserve Bank of Australia.

- PM strengthens ties with leaders at APEC meeting: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says his visit to San Francisco to attend the APEC meeting has provided him with the opportunity to meet several political and business leaders, including US President Joe Biden and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

- Medics fear for patients inside main Gaza hospital, Israel says tunnel shaft found: Palestinian medics said on Thursday they are increasingly afraid for the lives of hundreds of patients and medical staff at Gaza’s biggest hospital, cut off from all links to the outside world for more than a day after Israeli forces entered.